30 Pieces of a Novel (8 page)

was
the shortest. Or he might have met Bert a couple of times—Bert came over fairly frequently—and even walked to the Optimo with us once. ‘In fact,' he might have said, ‘if you feel lost or anything at Seventy-second and Broadway, go into the cigar store and ask your Uncle Bert's brother'—Hal or Hank, I think his name was,
Hesch
—‘to help you get home.' ‘In fact,' he might have said, ‘if you're lost anywhere from here to your home, ask someone where that Optimo cigar store is and go in it and get help from your Uncle Bert's brother, and if he's not there then tell somebody in the store that he is your Uncle Bert's brother and you need help getting home.' But all that's lost in the past, what he said and a lot of what I did. He might have just said—this would have been more like him, from what I remember of him then, or any boy his age when faced with a suddenly defiant and furiously independent younger kid, which I don't remember being before that incident, who they probably didn't much like taking care of in the first place. So who knows? Maybe that time was my declaration of independence, so to speak, when I thought I didn't need anybody taking care of me and could do things like walking home alone from so far away. Maybe I didn't even have a real argument with him. Or I contrived an argument just to get away from him so I could test out my new feeling of independence and taking care of myself. Anyway, he might have just said something about responsibility—his—when I left him. ‘Your mother will be mad. And I'm being paid to look after you,' which I think would have made me even more—what?—reluctant to go back to him if I'd already started on my way. Or ‘Oh, go the hell off if you want, you little turd, you stupid brat, I'm glad to be rid of you and I hope I am for good,' and went to his house with Terry Benjamin, which was just two blocks from ours, some other route, surely one where they wouldn't have to bump into me. Over to Central Park West, for instance, and then along it—even though that's a dull walk, just apartment buildings on one side and the park wall on the other—till Eightieth, and then down Eightieth to his block. Actually, there's no side street off Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first, because of the Natural History Museum there, so down Seventy-seventh or Eighty-first to Columbus and then north or south to Eightieth, where Terry Benjamin also lived,” and she says, “But what happened after? You were saying something about the Hundredth Street that never was,” and he says, “Well, I thought I got to a Hundredth and then, I think, because it was dark and I was tired from the walk, I got cold feet about walking back to Seventy-eighth. Or maybe that it was dark only came to me once I reached my goal. But I felt I was lost, all of a sudden became a dependent unself-sufficient kid again, you could say, and needed help getting home. So I went into what I thought was the friendliest kind of store on what I believed to be the corner of a Hundredth Street and Broadway, and I suppose I told them I was lost and about my cousin on Sixty-fifth or Sixty-sixth or someplace down there, and they asked my name and didn't sit me up on the soda fountain counter, or anything with an ice cream, and in fact asked me for a nickel—the cost of a phone call then—so they could call my home from the phone booth in the store,” and she says, “Why would they have to call from a booth?” and he says, “Wait. Maybe I wasn't lost or even a little worried about the dark but only exhausted and didn't want to walk home from there because I didn't think I had the strength to and also didn't have the money for bus fare downtown, if I even thought of that, or a trolley; I think they still had trolleys on Broadway. So I went into the drugstore not so much because I was lost, if at all that, but for help getting home, if you can see the difference,” and she says, “Okay, that could be so too, but I'm still asking why they would have to call from a booth. It's a drugstore, so there would have to be a private phone to take prescription orders on and so forth,” and he says, “I don't know, but it's what I remember. That they asked me for a nickel—
they
, meaning two men there, the druggist and maybe another druggist or a helper or someone—the soda-fountain man, of course! Someone had to be taking care of the counter—and I think they even got mad when I said I didn't have a cent on me. My cousin had paid for everything that day with the money my mother had given him, even for our candy in the theater,” and she says, “You remember the candy?” and he says, “I'm just saying
probably
, since I always was able to get a five-cent box of candy then when I went to the movies,” and she says, “But out of that money your mother gave him, he didn't give you bus or trolley fare home when you left him? No, he wouldn't have to; he thought you were walking fifteen blocks or so. Still, what these men did doesn't make sense—asking a little kid for a nickel to call his parents, who are probably beside themselves that he might be lost or abducted,” and he says, “Maybe that part about the nickel didn't happen. Is that possible? Because I remember vividly it did. Or maybe it did happen and they were only kidding me. That'd be more like it, but it really frightened me. I thought if I didn't come up with the nickel they wouldn't call my home and they'd send me back on the street and I'd have to try another store that might even be less friendly, and—who knew?—I also might have thought, How many stores are going to stay open, now that it was dark? Maybe this is the way people are on a Hundredth Street or just around there or from a Hundredth Street on, I might have thought, but I was scared, I'll tell you. But then one of the men called from a regular phone up front. I was standing beside him and must have given him my phone number or, if I didn't remember it, my last name and address or street I lived on and he got the number that way, from Information or the phone book, and called. But then I hear him say something on the phone that disappointed me I can't tell you how much, and that's that he's Dr. So-and-so, if he was the druggist, with a lost Gould Bookbinder in a drugstore on the southwest corner of Ninety-ninth Street and Broadway,” and he stops and smiles, and she says, “So what's the big disappointment?” and he says, “Ninety-ninth—not a Hundredth,” and she still looks as if she doesn't understand, and he says, “I didn't make it, don't you see? I thought I'd reached a Hundredth Street and then got a little concerned because it was dark and all that and went into a drugstore on what I thought was the corner of a Hundredth, and this guy—” and she says, “Oh. So you probably, once you reached a Hundredth, walked one block south till you found what you were looking for, a friendly-looking drugstore for someone to call your parents from,” and he says, “But that wasn't what happened, even though I could swear I looked up at the last corner street sign and saw
100TH STREET
on it, thought I'd reached my goal, and then got worried or something because of the dark and the time and the realization I was very far from home and tired and I'd never make it walking back and had no carfare and probably didn't know how to take the bus or trolley if I did have the fare and also wouldn't know what stop to get off, never thinking I could ask the driver to tell me, and went into a drugstore on that corner to have someone there call home for someone to come get me. So all my walking and defiance and everything was for nothing, I thought, when this man spoke into the phone, because who cared if you walked all the way to Ninety-ninth Street? One Hundredth was like another world, much farther than Ninety-ninth, three numerals to two, and so on,” and she says, “No, I'm sure you reached a Hundredth and then went into that drugstore on Ninety-ninth,” and he says, “Even if that were true, I couldn't prove it. I knew no landmarks on a Hundredth. The only ones I knew up there because I memorized them before I went into the drugstore were on Ninety-ninth, sort of confirming that I never got to a Hundredth. And I couldn't go a block north to get those Hundredth Street landmarks because I had to wait now in the drugstore till the person from home came. And when I got home? I don't remember what that was like, although I'm sure I got a tongue-lashing from my folks, if not worse: sent to bed without supper and that sort of thing. All I remember after is the ride home in the cab with the person who picked me up—it might even have been Uncle Bert—and him asking me why I ran away, because do I know how much I worried my mother? and I'm trying to explain about a Hundredth Street, and he's saying, ‘But I picked you up on Ninety-ninth,' and I just gave up right there, knowing nobody would take me seriously about it, they would only think of all I'd put them through,” and she says, “Yes, the story definitely rings a bell now—not the end of it, with your Hundredth Street disappointment, but going into the drugstore and someone picking you up and your feeling bad in the cab, though why you were feeling bad I don't remember your telling me,” and he says, “I'm sure I did, because otherwise there wouldn't have been any point in telling the story.”

AT THE YMCA
pool thirty miles from the house they're renting in Maine, only pool within eighty miles from them that has handicapped facilities, wife in the water doing exercises to relieve some of the symptoms of her disease (holding on to the handicapped-stairway rail and kicking her legs in the water, holding on to the pool's edge and stepping up and down), swimming instructor in the far lane across from them teaching some kids on his swim team (“Your head's going too far out of the water, you only need this tiny part of your mouth above it to breathe,” and demonstrates without putting his face in), lifeguard jumping off his perch and walking to the pool's deep end (probably to caution some boys who have been horsing around or at least making lots of noise and cannonballing into the water too hard), little girl on the bench at the shallow end where he is (maybe waiting for her brother or sister to get out of the water or for one of her parents to pick her up at the pool; “Don't wait in the lobby,” they might have told her, “stay in the swimming area where the lifeguard and other people are”), she must have been in the pool and then dressed for she's now shivering, maybe she's getting chilled because her clothes are wet where she didn't dry herself completely, and her hair too (you can't really dry your hair with a towel, and she probably didn't want to use a hair dryer for about fifteen minutes, if she came with one, or the Y would loan one to her as they do to his wife when she forgets hers), and she's sitting by an open door (it's unusual the door's open but it's hot, sticky, and sunny today and the air-conditioning might not be working or at least up to par), he should say something (“Excuse me, young lady, but why don't you move over to your right a little and out of the draft; then you won't be so cold”), she's drawing and writing on a pad attached to a clipboard, it seems, maybe a story with pictures, which is something his younger daughter loves doing and maybe most kids their age, around eight. She looks up and sees him looking at her and smiles, timidly, and continues to and he smiles back and looks away as he always does when he smiles at a kid he doesn't know; he thinks it'd look peculiar, if not to her then to someone around he didn't know, for an adult not to, for all sorts of reasons. Suddenly, he doesn't specifically know where it comes from, no special look or action of hers, he doesn't think; not the clothes or the way her body's positioned or that her hair isn't brushed or combed or that she's shivering, or yes, of course, the look, her smile, and how someone can do something like this after a child smiles, but it just comes, the thought: How can anyone kill a child anytime but especially out of racial or religious or ethnic reasons or that the state ordered me to or anything like that, a child you don't know or just know from around your area, gun one down, tear her from her parents or him from his and throw him into a pit and shoot him or into a room to gas her or beat her over the head with a gun butt or club till she's dead or slit her throat or throttle her or rape her repeatedly and many men raping her along with you till she's dead or just sniping at her from a quarter mile away with a very powerful scope? What kind of argument—he's thinking about people who aren't insane—could be used to justify such an act? There are no arguments for it. He means the killers or potential ones might be giving them, or think they are, but there isn't an argument for it that holds. He knows this is nothing new, what he's thinking, though when he's thought of it before it was always, How could anyone kill my kid? But it suddenly hits him with this one as it never had, using this shivering girl as an example, he's thinking, and the shivering must have had something to do with it. But let's say someone's told by his commanding officer to shoot all the kids hiding from them in buildings and basements of some town, how could he—anyone—possibly do it, shoot one? All she'd have to do, if this was one of the kids caught, is smile as she smiled at him before, or any kind of smile, a nervous or frightened or pleading one, and how could the shooter shoot? How could the shooter do anything but say—and again, if he wasn't insane or mentally disabled, but he wouldn't be in the army if he was anything like that, or a country's legitimate army and not just a bunch of men thrown together into some military group and given weapons to kill every civilian not of their religion or nationality and so on—This is crazy and wrong, there is absolutely no reason or cause or justification or anything to kill or do anything bad to this girl or to any kid. I shouldn't even yell at her except for something like getting her to duck to avoid a sniper's bullet. She's totally innocent, that's all—or she's not so innocent in some ways; she could be a thief and a conniver and so on—but she's a child and that's enough not to kill her. Whatever I'm involved in, she's not, and whether she smiled or didn't smile, just that she's a kid is reason enough not to shoot her no matter what reason or excuse or whatever some military or political or religious leader or thinker or anyone like that gives me. Nothing like “Well, in eight to ten years she'll begin producing kids who'll grow up to shoot your kids and grandkids or she can grow up to shoot them—male or female, just put a gun in their hands and watch them shoot, and the truth is she can even start shooting your kids at the age she is now.” Or “She's scum, her people have always been scum and don't deserve to live. They foul everything they touch, they are beneath anything you can imagine the worst living thing's beneath, they destroy your homes and build their hovels on your land. They do away with your customs and beliefs and impose theirs, their foods stink, their clothes are filth, they have no culture, and there's vermin in their beards and head hair; they are evil incarnate, people of the devil, the scourges and enemies of our ancestors; they keep us powerless and poor and weak, the world will be thankful when every last one of them is wiped out, you will be rewarded generously and praised effusively for helping to do it, and you may even get your own pathway to heaven for having taken part in the slaughter and extermination.” After hearing any of that, maybe hearing it for years and maybe all of it and since you were very young and from your parents and teachers and the most revered people you know or in your community and so forth, one's supposed to go out and shoot a kid? Suppose the officer or leader or even your father says, “Do what I say and shoot this girl or we'll shoot you,” what do you do? Okay, not your father, but the others, what? You run away. Suppose this person or anyone or group that has this authority over you says, “Do what we say and shoot this girl or we'll not only shoot her but you,” what do you do? You run away and try to find your family, or those members of it who don't think that way, and help them run away too if they want to. And if you can't run away or hide? Then you have to die, that's all, or, rather, take the chance to see if they will shoot you, though of course trying in every possible way to convince them not to and also not to kill the girl. But you cannot shoot a little girl or any child, and no threat or inducement or act of persuasion or anything like that can make you do it, though torture might, but how? Torture, if it got beyond anything you could take, could make you do just about anything, it'd seem. And if they grab your wife or daughter or mother or sister and say, “We're going to rape and then shoot her unless you shoot that girl” or “We'll rape and shoot all the women and children in your family no matter how young they are, even if one's only one, unless you do what we say,” what do you do? You say you can't and give all sorts of reasons why not and plead and cry and cajole and beg and say, “Shoot me instead, please, shoot, torture, and rape me in place of them, anything you want to do to me do,” even though they don't need you to tell them they can do whatever they want with you and there'd be no assurance they wouldn't rape and shoot all of them including that girl after they torture and shoot you, but anyway you wouldn't see any reason to live after they raped and killed all the people they'd said or just your daughter. What about if someone told you, “That boy has a gun, he's about to kill me, shoot him”? All right, if the boy's holding a gun you know is loaded and pointing it close and threatening to shoot and the person you know didn't do anything to warrant being shot, like threaten to kill the boy before he had a gun or his sister or mother, then you might have to shoot him, or even a girl in this case, but in the arm or foot, some place that would stop the kid from shooting but have the least chance of being fatal, and only even that if you quickly gauged you couldn't bring him down any other way. But that's the only reason he can think of to shoot a kid, when his own life, or maybe not even that but the life of someone he knows very well is being threatened like that. Anyway, it was the smile that brought these thoughts up—all the possible killings, he means, and what he'd do and not do regarding shooting a child and so forth—and her shivering too, he's almost sure of that, particularly that she drew her shoulders in when she did, and maybe also because it was such a timid smile, though he's less sure on that score, and perhaps also that she's around his younger daughter's age and his older daughter was once that age so he knows how innocent and un-something, not “unevil” or “uncorrupted” but just, well, unmalevolent or something they are for the most part or ninety-nine out of a hundred parts, and he looks at her and she's busily writing on the pad and she looks up as if sensing he's looking at her, and he smiles and she looks right down without smiling and continues writing. I'm making her self-conscious, he thinks, and swims over to his wife. He's been in the water, dunking himself now and then but mostly just standing.