The Naked and the Dead (35 page)

            The throe quivers along his back, leaves his loins charged and sickly.

            How about one on the house?

            Aw, now, honey, you know what Eddie would do if he found us girls givin' it away.

            He dresses quickly, feeling her arm on his shoulder. I'm sorry, Red, listen, you come up next time, and I'll talk a little French to you, just between you and me, okay?

            At this moment her mouth is soft, and her breasts seem swollen. He touches her nipple for a moment; counterfeit of passion, it strains against his finger. You're a good kid, Pearl.

            One of the best.

            The light bulb is naked, and it flares in his eyes cruelly. He inhales her powder, the sweet sweat of her armpits. . .

            How'd you get started, Pearl?

            I'll tell ya over a glass of beer someday.

            Outside, the air is cold like a tart and icy apple. He feels a deep melancholy, pleasurable and extensive, but when he is in his room he cannot sleep.

            I been in this town too long. (The brown bare hills deepening in the twilight. The night rolls away into the west.) WHERE IS THE BEAUTY WE LOST IN OUR YOUTH?

            He gets up and looks out the window. Jesus, I feel old, twenty-three and I'm an old man. After a time he falls asleep.

            In the morning the sweat eddies corrosively in his eyes, and the steam erupts from the dish racks. Rub the lipstick loose before the glasses go in.

            I guess I'll be moving again. It's no good having it steady pay. But this time there is less hope in it.

            A park bench is really too small for a man to sleep comfortably. If his feet dangle over the edge, the slats cut into the back of his knees, and if he draws them up, he awakens with a cramp in his thigh. For a skinny man, it's impossible to sleep on his side. The boards grate against his hipbones, and his shoulder becomes stiff. He has to lie on his back with his knees propped toward the sky, and his hands under his head; when he gets up his fingers are numb for many minutes.

            Red is awakened by a jarring shock in his skull. He springs up, sees the policeman raising his nightstick to strike the soles of his shoes again.

            Okay, I'm movin', take it easy.

            You ought to know better than to stay here, Mac.

            In the false dawn of four A.M. the milk trucks are advancing' slowly down the silent streets. Red watches the horse chomp at his feed bag, and walks down toward the railroad. At an all-night hash house, across from the black iron mangle of the railroad yards, he nurses a cup of coffee and a doughnut until it is morning. For a long time he stares at the dirty floor and the white marble counter with its coffee rings, the round celluloid cake covers. Once he falls asleep with his head on the counter.

            Aaah, I been doing this too long. It's no good steady, and it's no good bumming. Ya lose whatever you want when you start goin' for it.

            At first it looks like his period of relative prosperity and then like the tail of the comet, but it turns out to be neither. He catches a job as a truck driver on an overnight freight route from Boston to New York, and holds it for two years. Route 1 wears a furrow in his mind. Boston to Providence to Groton to New London to New Haven to Stamford to the Bronx to the markets, and back the next night. He has a room on West 48th, near Tenth Avenue, and he can save money if he tries.

            But he hates the truck. It's the coal mines in open air, it jars at his back and in a thousand, a million tiny jounces, his kidneys begin to go and his stomach is too tricky in the morning to chance breakfast. Maybe there has been one park bench too many, maybe there was too much rain in too many open places, but the truck route is no good. The last hundred miles he always drives with his teeth clenched. He drinks a lot, drifting along the bars on Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and sometimes he spends his free time in one movie house after another, the tawdry second-runs on 42nd Street.

            One night in a bar he buys an ordinary seaman's card for ten bucks from a drunk who is about to go under, and he quits his job. But after a week of hanging around South Street, he gets tired of it and goes on a long drunk. After a week, when his money is gone, he sells the seaman's card for five bucks and keeps going for an afternoon on the whisky it buys.

            He wakes up that night in an alley with a blood crust on his cheek. When he grimaces he can feel the crust shredding into cracks. A cop picks him up and sends him to Bellevue, where he is kept for two days, and when he gets out he panhandles for a couple of weeks.

            But there is the happy ending. He catches a job finally as a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties, and he gets friendly with a waitress there, ends up by living with her in a couple of furnished rooms on West 27th Street. She has an eight-year-old kid who likes Red, and they get along well for a couple of years.

            Red switches to a job as night clerk in one of the flophouses on the Bowery. It's easier than dishwashing, and pays him five bucks more, twenty-three a week. He holds on to it for the last two years before the war, drifting along through the liquid fetid heat of summer in the Bowery and the chill damp winters when the walls leak and the brown plaster becomes stained with gray. Long nights pass in which he thinks of nothing, listening dully to the periodic wrangling passage of the trains on the Third Avenue el, waiting for the morning so he can go home to Lois.

            Several times a night he passes through the main room where forty or fifty men are sleeping uneasily on their iron cots, and he listens to the constant soft coughing and smells the harsh styptic formalin and the bodies of the old drunks, a crabbed smell, glum and soured. The hallways and the bathroom stink of disinfectant, and over the urinals there is almost always a drunk retching his liquor, holding dreamily to the porcelain near the flush lever. He closes the door and goes into the card room, where a few old men are playing pinochle around an old round table, the floor under them black with grease and cigarette ends. Red listens to their talk, mumbled and unfinished.

            Maggie Kennedy was a fine figure of a woman, she said to me, now, what was it she said?

            I told Tommy Muldoon he had no call to be running me in, and when I got done, he let me go I'll tell you that. They're afraid of me ever since I broke Ricchio's jaw, you know he was the precinct sergeant, back in, well, now wait a minute and I'll tell you the date, I broke his jaw with one punch back in a New Year's night eight year ago, 1924 it was, no, wait a moment back in 1933 that's closer to it.

            The standing gag. Hey, you rummies, pipe down goddammit we got some paying guests in the next room. I'll run you out.

            They're silent for a moment and then one of them says in his low mumbling voice, You ain't so smart, young feller, and ifen you don't shut your mouth I'll be obliged to whop you.

            Come on down in the street, and I'll take you on.

            Then one of them comes up to Red, and whispers to him, You better leave him alone 'cause he'll throw you down the stairs, the last night man he broke his neck.

            Yeah. Red grins. I'm sorry I disturbed ya, pop, I'll be minding my manners.

            You do that, son, and you and me won't have no trouble.

            Across the street, they can hear a jukebox grinding in a barroom.

            Back behind the night desk, Red turns on his radio and plays it softly. (THE LEAVES OF BROWN CAME TUMBLING DOWN.) One of the men awakens screaming. Red goes into the hall and quiets him, patting him on the shoulder and leading him back to his cot.

            In the morning the bums dress hurriedly, and the big room is empty by seven. They hustle along the chill streets in the dawn, their caps pulled down to their eyes, and their old jacket collars scrounged around their necks. As if they were ashamed, they won't look at one another, and like automatons most of them line up in the alleys off Canal Street for the coffee they receive from soup kitchens. Red walks through the streets for a while before he catches the bus up to West 27th. The long night is always depressing.

            He looks at his feet striding along. Nothing's worth a good goddam.

            But back in their furnished room, Lois is cooking his breakfast on a hotplate, and the kid, Jackie, comes running up to him, shows him a new schoolbook. Red feels tired and happy.

            Yeah, that's nice, kid, he says, patting him on the shoulder.

            When Jackie has left for school, Lois sits down to eat breakfast with him. Since he has been working in the flophouse they have only their mornings together. At eleven she leaves for the restaurant.

            The eggs dry enough for you, honey? she asks.

            Yeah, swell.

            Outside, in the new morning, some trucks are grinding by on Tenth Avenue. The traffic has an early-morning sound. Jesus, this is okay, he says aloud.

            You like it, huh, Red.

            Yeah.

            She fingers her glass. Listen, Red, I went to see a lawyer yesterday about gettin' a divorce from Mike.

            Yeah?

            I can do it for a hundred dollars, a little more maybe, but should I, I mean whatthehell if nothing should come of it, maybe it'd be better not to.

            I dunno, kid, he says to her.

            Red, I ain't askin' you to get married, you know I ain't nagged you, but I gotta look ahead.

            It's all there before him. The choice again, but it means admitting he's through. I dunno, Lois, that's the goddam truth. I like ya a lot and you're a good kid, there's no gettin' away from that, an' it's only fair to ya, but I gotta think about it. I ain't made for stay in' in one place, I dunno there's just somethin', it's kind've a big country.

            Just be fair, Red. Ya gotta let me know one way or the other.

            Only the war starts before he has made up his mind. That night all the drunks in the flophouse are excited.

            I was a sergeant in the last one, I'm going to go up there and ask them to take me back.

            Yeah, they'll make ya a major.

            I'm going to tell you, Red, that they need me. They're gonna need every one of us.

            Someone is passing around a bottle, and on an impulse Red sends one of the men down with a ten-dollar bill to buy some whisky.

            Lois could use the ten, and he knows the answer then. He can marry her and stay out of the war, but he's not old yet, he's not that tired. In the war you keep on moving.

            THERE'S A LONG LONG TRAIL AWINDING, one of the bums sings.

            We're gonna do a lot of cleaning up, I hear they got some niggers down in Washington that's a fact, I was readin' it in the newspapers they got a nigger down there tellin' white men what to do.

            War's gonna fix all that.

            Aaah, balls, Red butts in, the big boys are just gonna get a little more. But he is excited. So long, Lois, no entangling alliances.

            And Jackie too. A little pit of misery. But if you stop and quit moving you die.

            Have a drink.

            It's my liquor, Red bellows, what do ya mean, have a drink! (Laughter.)

            On his last pass before he went overseas, Red wandered around San Francisco. He climbed up to the top of Telegraph Hill, and shivered in the fall winds sweeping across the summit. A tanker was heading for the Golden Gate, and he watched it, and then stared across Oakland as far as he could see into the east. (After Chicago the land was flat for a thousand miles, across Illinois and Iowa and halfway into Nebraska. On a train you could read a magazine for an afternoon, then look out the window, and the country would seem exactly the same as when you had stared out before. The foothills began as gentle rolls in the plain and after a hundred miles became isolated as hills, took almost a thousand miles to become mountains. And on the way were the steep brown hills that massed into Montana.) Maybe I should write them a letter. Or Lois.

            Aaah, you don't look back.

            Two ensigns with young girls in fur coats were laughing and hugging at the other end of the paved summit of Telegraph Hill. I might as well go down.

            He walked through Chinatown, ended up in a burlesque house. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the place was almost empty. The girls dragged languidly through their dances, the comedians fumbled through the skits. After the last strip and the ensemble the lights went on, and the hawkers began to sell Nestle bars and picture books. Red sat in his seat and dozed a little. What a lousy joint.

            There seemed nothing to do, and all through the movie he thought of the boat he would be traveling on soon. You keep rolling along and you never know what the hell the score is. When you're a kid they can't tell you a damn thing, and when you ain't a kid no more there's nothing new for you. You just got to keep pushing it, you don't look back.

            When the picture ended and the show began again, he listened to the music for a moment and then went out. In the painful sun of late afternoon he could hear the band still playing.

            WE'RE GONNA SLAP THE DIRTY LITTLE JAP.

            Fug it.

8

            Lieutenant (sg) Dove finished covering his bare legs with sand and groaned. "Oh, God, it's brutal," he exclaimed.

            "What's brutal?" Hearn asked.

            Dove wiggled his toes through the sand. "Just being out here. My God, a hot day like this. A year ago I was in Washington, and if you think there weren't some parties there. Oh, this goddam climate."