The Fires of Spring (41 page)

“You mean, you pull that trick in every town?” David asked.

“Son!” the Wild Man replied. “It’s shore a warm day. Let’s don’t pry into trade secrets? OK?” He stretched out on the box and pulled a handkerchief across his face. He was dozing there when the little boy came round the end of the tent.

“Hey! Mister!” the boy called. “Come here a minute!”

Jensen rose, twisted his rugged body, and smoothed down his hair. He went to where the boy was gesticulating. Shyly, from around the canvas, came a dark girl of seventeen, accompanied by a younger sister. She seemed perfect in the afternoon sun, her brown hair and tanned face matching the canvas.

“This here is Sue Tucker,” the little boy said proudly. “Didn’t I tell you she was pretty?”

Sue blushed and David wished that it was he talking with her, leaning relaxed against the guy ropes the way Jensen
did. “I …” she began in a half-childish, half-womanly voice. “That is, my mother … we heard you’ve been eating in restaurants …”

Sue fumbled with words, so that her little sister broke in, “Mom says, ‘Why don’t you eat with us?’ ” Sue blushed again. The Wild Man leaned harder upon the rope as if deeply displeased. He scowled at the little boy.

“You shouldn’t of told her about the restaurants!” he chafed. The boy opened his mouth and stared.

“So if you would like to eat with us,” Sue continued. She wore a summer dress and seemed to be striving to fill it as if it were a challenge.

“You go to college?” Jensen asked.

“Next year I’ll be a sophomore,” she said. “At Penn State.”

“Say!” Jensen cried. “That’s a mighty good school!” He unwound himself from the rope and said, “I’ll tell you, Sue. I’ve got to be back here at seven-thirty. Hardly be fair to your mother …”

“We could eat early!” Sue stammered, falling over words in her eagerness to reassure him.

“Then maybe I could make it,” the Wild Man admitted, thoughtfully. He slipped the bewildered boy a dime and took the little sister’s hand. “What’s your name, little girl?” he asked.

They set forth, the three of them, and toward eight Jensen returned. After the show Sue and her mother came back to see the Wild Man. “You were very good!” Sue observed.

“They don’t give me much to say,” Wild Man replied. There was a moment of hesitation and then Jensen, greasy and big, pulled Sue to him and gave her a tremendous kiss. David saw the kiss and watched the manner in which Sue closed her eyes and broke away with paint upon her cheeks. The girl’s mother was embarrassed and grabbed her daughter. Together they picked their way through the tent and Sue turned back to cry, “Write to me!”

Jensen watched them go and then wiped the grease paint from his face. He rubbed the massive growth of hair on his chest. “Beats eatin’ in restaurants!” he observed to no one in particular.

In every town he suborned some boy to find him the prettiest girl. Then one day he had to buy a broom, and David understood him much better. Up to that particular day Jensen had been merely a scatter-brained romantic, meeting young girls as they came shyly to invite him to dinner.
He was kind to them, friendly to their little sisters, and most courteous to their mothers who cooked the meals. He kissed them good night and wrote each one at least two fine letters: “We played Farrell, Pennsylvania, tonight and when the tent came down I imagined that you were here again …”

But in Charleroi, where he bought the broom, things were different. The prettiest girl in town was well rouged up, and Jensen reported for the play smelling strongly of whiskey. After the show he said to David and Vito, “I’d like to use the truck for about half an hour.” He drove off with it and later that night David and Vito found pins and perfume all through their blankets.

“Stop the truck!” Vito suddenly called in his deepest bass.

“What’s up?” Jensen cried back through the sliding window.

“What’s this in my bed?” Vito roared.

Jensen turned his head. “It’s a garter belt!” he announced.

“What do I want with a garter belt?” Vito bellowed.

“Throw it out the back!” Jensen ordered.

But when they stopped that night for two-o’clock coffee Jensen asked the restaurant keeper if he’d sell that broom in the corner. “Whadda you need a broom for?” the man inquired.

“System!” Jensen explained. Later he explained things to David and the dwarf. “When I go looking for a girl,” he said, “all I want is a nice girl. I like ’em fine that way. A good meal. A nice home. Maybe a kiss. I just yearn to be with girls, that’s all. But sometimes even nice girls like to do a little explorin’. Now when this broom is hangin’ out the end of the truck I don’t want any interference. Come up, shift gears when it’s time to go, and I’ll wind everything up in ten minutes. That’s a promise.”

So through Ohio and much of Indiana and Illinois the Wild Man blew into one town after another. “Son!” he’d say to some dark-haired boy, “Who’s the prettiest pigeon in town?” And if that girl, when she appeared—and she almost always did—was chafing at the edge of life, eager to try her new-fledged body, Jensen was an admirable companion. The broom would hang out the end of the dark truck, and Vito, when he climbed in front to shift gears, would hear subdued giggles coming from his bed.

But if the girl was afraid, not yet sure of herself, the Wild Man treated her as tenderly as if she were his own sister. He would be all gallantry and tell her, when the last
garish light swung back and forth on the last tent pole, “I’ll write to you. Yep. From the very next town.”

After such nights he would ask David to ride up front with him as the dark truck rolled westward to the next distant tent. “Everybody in the world wants to be in love,” he said one night. “If I was a million guys I couldn’t make love or write to all the girls who would like me to. God! I tell you! I see unhappy women like the Gonoph! My heart breaks, Dave! Honest to God, I have so much fun in life I sometimes almost cry for them that don’t.”

David asked, “Don’t you ever fall in love? Really?”

“Me?” Jensen cried, dropping his hands from the wheel. “I’m in love every day. I get almost breathless waiting to see who’s comin’ round the edge of the tent. I know she’s gonna be beautiful because she thinks she’s comin’ to see an actor! I go day after day through a long string of towns. I’ll never see any of ’em again. Never! But for that short visit I can imagine that I’m really somebody. An actor like Cyril. And I can make any girl think so, too! God! In a job like this all girls are beautiful!”

The rolling truck sped through the dark and silent towns. Canton, Wooster, Mansfield. “Imagine!” Jensen cried. “We could stop in any place along the road. Any town at all. And in the afternoon there’d be some pretty girl who’d want to convince herself that she loved me!” He wrenched the truck back onto its course and pointed ahead to a dull glow in the sky. “What’s the next town?” he asked.

“Massillon,” David said.

“Massillon!” the Wild Man repeated softly, rolling the syllables upon his tongue. “In Massillon there’s a beautiful girl. She’s sleepin’ now, and I’ll never see her. But you’re beautiful, you little pigeon! Go on sleepin’.”

Never before had David heard quite so frank a song of love. It baffled him, and for a long time—until they had passed through Massillon—he rode in silence. Finally he asked, “Don’t you use the broom a lot?”

Jensen laughed and bent over the steering wheel. At last he said, “I’ll tell you, Dave. Just about the right percentage. Every three or four nights. But don’t ever let anybody kid you, fellow. Sleepin’ with a lovely woman! That’s the better half of livin’.”

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.