Cain’s Book (16 page)

I think I might have screamed, at least a dying curse, when a lighter line, his one remaining dockline, came snaking across my bows. I moved at once, aware in a side glance of the yawning
distance between my scow and his, and thrust the eye of his line over my bollard amidships. I signalled frantically that it was secure and watched him stumble backwards with the free end of the
line. He took a few quick (or slow) turns around his own port bollard and prepared to check it out slowly. I knew now what he was up to. You can’t control a single hawser manually in rough
weather. If my last hawser had remained unparted we might have collided as castanets do on a short string. That anyway is the theory upon which he was prepared to risk casting me adrift. I clung to
the capstan and watched him prepare himself for an unknown shock. At the instant at which the rope became taut anything could happen. Fishermen know about this. The moment at which the rope takes
the strain is the danger point. Check too strongly and the line will snap. Check too generously and a fish will run away with the longest line. I calculated that (if he hadn’t sold some to a
junkman to buy lush) he still had about thirty feet of dockline to play with, and I felt that was very little for a give-and-take between two monsters on a rough sea. The tautening rope with spray
darting from it emitted a dangerous singing sound which came to me by a strange species of sensory selection above all the other noises of wood, wind and sea. The first abrasive retch of the rope
at his bollard and I knew that the rope was now running like a quick snake through his gloved hands.

“Take another fucking turn!”

I think he did so, for I could see now he was bracing himself. I watched him pay out a few more feet of line, and then he was checking hard, paying it out inch by inch. But I knew there
couldn’t be much of it left. Not much of his line left, after which I in my weighted coffin would drift off alone into the night.

I thought of preparing a line of my own, but it was pointless. I could only make out the vague shadow of his stern now and I couldn’t have thrown it that far in the wind.

I became aware again of the Atlantic, big, black and endless, and wished to hell I’d had a fix. If I’d had a fix in the cabin I think I would have struggled back along the lifeline.
I hope the fucking tug knows what’s happened back here, I thought. I was still clinging to the capstan, shivering in a T-shirt and shorts, and then, as suddenly as the first noise, I felt
myself picked out like a wet insect by a searchlight.

Another tug was moving swiftly alongside.

A laconic voice came through a megaphone:

“What d’you use for hawsers aboard that boat of yours, Mac? Your brassiere?”

I watched a deckhand throw a line skilfully over my port bollard. I looked at the bridge: “Fuck you, egghead!” I screamed.

I
AM UNFORTUNATELY
not concerned with the events which led up to this or that. If I were my task would be simpler. Details
would take their meaning from their relation to the end and could be expanded or contracted, chosen or rejected, in terms of how they contributed to it. In all this, there is no it, and there is no
startling fact or sensational event to which the mass of detail in which I find myself from day to day wallowing can be related. Thus I must go on from day to day accumulating, blindly following
this or that train of thought, each in itself possessed of no more implication than a flower or a spring breeze or a molehill or a falling star or the cackle of geese. No beginning, no middle, no
end. This is the impasse which a serious man must enter and from which only the simple-minded can retreat. Perhaps there is no harm in telling a few stories, dropping a few turds along the way, but
they can only be tidbits to hook the unsuspecting with as I coax them into the endless tundra which is all there is to be explored. God knows it’s a big enough confidence trick to make
someone listen to you as you gabble on without pretending to explain how Bella got her bum burnt. I said to myself: “Well now, here’s a nice barren wilderness for you to sport and
gambol in, with no premises and no conclusions, with no way in and no way out, and with nary a trail for the eye to see. What more can a man want to fill his obscene horizons?” Drainage
trouble in your home? Drainage trouble? A stopped-up sewer may be to blame. I drank a bottle of cough syrup (4 fluid oz., morphine content 1/6 grain per fluid oz.) and took a couple of
dexies
²¹
and felt better. Nothing like a short snifter to buck you up when you find yourself near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sitting on the hand pump on
the port quarter of your scow whose starboard side is swinging just free of the docks, and the dung-coloured water sliding away smoothly, horizontally, before your eye. On it, a tanker. Beyond it,
and to either side of it, low brown and green countryside, low bridges, concrete piles, elevated roads with automobiles like little ladybirds running across them, and squat and strutted things,
trucks, gas tanks, telegraph poles, scows, gravel, endless concrete, low, flat, dispersed, representing, dear reader, man’s functional rape of unenviable countryside, marginal flat and
bogland. As the afternoon wore on the sky was becoming thin and milky-white and the water gleamed blankly in reflection. To walk beyond it all would have taken how long, one pillbox after another
through the skeleton factory, mile after mile flat and deserted? The nearest bar, I was told by the last dockhand before they knocked off, was just over a mile away beyond that underpass; that the
first evidence that man was not only a working animal, and yet really not much more than a filling station between there and the next bar a mile further on, and so on, and so on. It reminded me of
the North Sea in a fog, of Hull or Sheerness, places like that on the east coast of England.

I left the scow after dark around ten-thirty and walked through a brickyard to reach the path leading up to the road. I walked slowly along a single railway track overgrown with weeds and found
myself amongst brick kilns like the kind of sandcastles you make by inverting a child’s sand pail. The furnaces of two of the kilns were going full blast, casting a red glow which threw my
shadow in black on the wet gravel. – I am walking through hell or Auschwitz, I thought. And then the dreary climb up beyond the underpass. It was spitting rain.

It took me an hour and a half by bus, ferry and subway to reach the Village. I bumped into Jody in MacDougal Street. We walked towards Sheridan Square. Jody was wearing blue
jeans and a cheap, imitation-leather jacket, powder blue in colour. Someone gave it to her. She disliked it but it was at least warm and all her own clothes, so she had told me, were locked away in
two suitcases, impounded by some landlady uptown to whom she owed rent.

As we approached the lights of the intersection her hand went automatically to her hair. It was fine brown hair, cut short and close at the ears, and cut short like that it made her finely
chiselled features look hard and sculpted. This impression was intensified by the wide sweep of her plucked eyebrows and by the mockery which came often into her beautiful pale brown eyes.

She lived with a girl called Pat who loved her and paid the rent. That was Jody’s way. Jody’s share of the rent, if she could have brought herself to pay anything, would have been
less than the price of staying high for a day. But for some reason or other Jody never paid. She invented excuses. She had lost it. It had been stolen. She had been burnt. Pat was a square, a
lush... why pay her anything? And if it wasn’t Pat it was someone else, even myself at times, and Jody could always find a word to cap her victim and justify the unseemly executions. There
was the time she took twenty dollars from me to cop and didn’t return until the following evening high out of her mind with a full-blown story of a big bust and shit flushed down toilets and
arm inspections and Malayan elephants and she had been lucky to get away at all. (Not just one little taste for me, Jody?
The iris closing
. You hang me up for twenty-four hours waiting for
shit, you come back zonked and expect me to think it’s lucky you got back without it? Aw, Joe, I couldn’t help it, honest. Let’s blow some pot, Joe, just you and me... I
didn’t burn you, Joe, honest... I told you it was a bust, honest...)

I met her first through Geo. I was staying at Moira’s place. Moira had gone away for a fortnight. The blinds were drawn all the time. I scarcely left the apartment. It was a time of fixing
and waiting and being and fixing and waiting. Jody made all the runs. She had a good contact. She came with Geo and when he left she stayed, like some object he found too heavy to carry away. How
do you do, Jody? It seems you’re living with me. The atmosphere became much less tense the morning Geo left to return to his scow. Jody asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. And she went
out and brought back some milk and a few cakes. Jody loved cakes. She loved cakes and horse and all the varieties of soda pop. I knew what she meant. Some things surprised me at first, the way for
example she stood for hours like a bird in the middle of the room with her head tucked in at her breast and her arms like drooping wings. At first this grated on me, for it meant the presence of an
element unresolved in the absolute stability created by the heroin. She swayed as she stood, dangerous as Pisa. But she never fell and I soon got used to it and even found it attractive. One time
she turned blue and I carried her over to the bed and massaged her scalp. She came round almost at once. It might have been the increase of circulation in her head. Or it might have been the fact
that Jody didn’t like anyone to touch her hair, or indeed, any other part of her. She was always at the mirror, arranging her hair. It had to be perfect, that and her makeup. Sometimes when
she was high she would spend as much as an hour in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Does it never occur to you that you spend a helluva time each day in front of a mirror?”

She was immediately, you might say understandably, on the defensive. A shadow crossed her face, the secret closing of the iris.

Her skin and her colour suggested delicate, fragile china. The clearly marked eyebrows, the finely curved cheek, and the dark, accentuated beauty of the eyes, heightened this masklike effect.
Her lips were dull, soft, red, hard, full; the nose aquiline, curved smoothly and sharply, like all the other aspects of her face. Her pupils were often pinned and shadowy, her delicate nostrils
tense.

In a way she was always abstracted. I have described a beautiful face, but the beauty was not at all conventional. In fact there were moments... when she was stoned in the flesh and tired by the
use of too many drugs, by too little sleep, by a hard coil of inner desperation which caused a certain latent vulgarity that was hers to come to the surface... when she looked cheap and ugly. Below
the mask then a stupid confusion was evident. It showed in her whole manner, particularly in the nervous movement of her hand arranging her hair, a movement which was indistinguishable from the
fatuous gesture a cheap whore might make as she stood up, caught sight of herself in a wall mirror, and prepared a face to leave the bar with.

Like many part-time hustlers she had had many affairs with other women. They always ended in the same way. The other woman did the hustling. When Pat had an accident and was taken to hospital
Jody didn’t budge from the apartment. “I hate sick people,” she said. Pat sent Jody money from the hospital. When Pat came out she was confined to bed. “She thought
I’d take care of her, Jesus! I’d be readin’ and she’d
want
somethin’! She always
wanted
somethin’!”

We crossed 7th Avenue and went into Jim Moore’s.

“She comes on with this baby stuff,” Jody said. “Jo-dee! It makes me sick. Always buggin’ me!”

“What did you do?”

“I ignored her. Then she got mad an’ said she paid the rent. I asked her what that had to do with it. She thought she’d
bought
me! Can you imagine that? You broke your
leg, I said. I didn’t. If you didn’t get so damn lushed it wouldn’t’ve happened. I wouldn’t take the blame for anythin’, nothin’!” Jody said. She
pulled her coffee to her and drank some as soon as it arrived. She put sugar into it and asked for some more jelly with her English muffin. “She screamed herself sick all day an’ next
day she moved out. She went to stay with a friend till her leg was better.”

I burst out laughing.

The way Jody said it was funny. But that wasn’t what I was laughing at, although she was under the impression it was and burst out laughing in delight at my response. And her delight was
no less affecting because it was, in a logical sense, mistakenly triggered. Spontaneous laughter is infectious and draws people together. And I had laughed first and found myself effectively
delighting in her delight. The words, even their meanings, were in a sense superfluous. I remember wondering at that, how the fact of laughing together nullified the inauthenticity. Even now it is
with a feeling of generosity that I remember what I laughed at then, which was the memory of her own pathetic indignation when someone up in Harlem burnt her – “The bastard! After all
I’ve done for him! When he had no bread I used to turn him on!” – about that, and the self-criticism her hard talk about Pat implied, for, like people generally, Jody, no matter
what she was talking about, talked exclusively about herself. I used to wonder whether she knew it.

When we had finished our coffee and when no one we knew had come along... we were looking for loot to score with... we crossed West 4th to the Côte d’Or. We pushed in through the
swing doors. The place was crowded, dark as usual, the bar on the left and the single row of tables on the right. The first thing you noticed was the exhibition of paintings along two walls just
below the ceiling. At that time they changed them every so often, but soon it was just a bar again with a mixed clientele. I didn’t go there much by that time because it was one of the few
places I was fingered. I had been waiting for Fay, drinking a beer, and I had been spotted by the barmen as one who was more interested in dope than in drink. That’s a bad thing in any bar,
and barmen are quick to notice. Most barmen are very indignant about drugs. Still, one of the barmen had been in Paris and most of his customers were very friendly towards me. It’s true that
Fay was as loud as a white feather in wartime; if anyone ever looked like a junkie, she did. With her unkempt hair, her fur coat and her blue face, she moved ferret-like into a noisy bar crowd and
out again. I have seen many a drunken face frozen, the lower jaw dropping, to follow Fay with the eyes out of the bar. Fay and I left together and hadn’t gone much more than a block when we
were suddenly grasped from behind and thrust roughly into the entrance hall of a small block of flats. A strange coolness descended on me as soon as I felt the hands; in my imagination I was
already saying to the policeman: “And now be on your way, sir. You have no business with me.” And then I was looking at them. Middle-sized, they were dressed in leather lumber jackets
and looked like competitors in the Tour de France. They were flashing some kind of identity cards which evidently convinced me. It hadn’t occurred to me that they could be anybody else. They
were straight out of Kafka. And yet I knew they were real beer. I don’t know whether they were members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or of the Internal Revenue Service, but they were
very ugly in their anonymity and very impertinent. Fay seemed to know them well and immediately adopted a doglike attitude towards them. She wagged her tail. Tongue and saliva drooled from her
mouth in friendly effervescence. I found myself against the wall with one of the bicyclists ordering me to turn out my pockets. My passport would stop him for a bit. Ten years of border-crossing
had furnished me with impressive documents. I was carrying some bennies,
²²
but I wasn’t worried about my vulnerability. I was worried about
Fay’s. In fact she knew far more about these men than I did, having met them before. But I was a foreigner and might be deported very easily. Fay could expose more with less danger than I. As
I slowly and absent-mindedly emptied my pockets, I ignored the man who was examining me and kept interrupting Fay’s interrogator.