Hunger and Thirst (40 page)

“How tall are you?”

“Six foot and a fourth of an inch.”

“6’4” typed the corporal.”

“What color are your eyes?”

“Green.”

The corporal checked.
Hazel
, he typed. He looked at Erick’s hair.
Brown
, he typed.

Rifleman 745. Combat Infantry Badge. Rhineland Go 40 WD 45 European-African-Middle Eastern Ribbon. Certificate of Disability for Discharge. Section I AR 615-362 4 Nov. 44 1
^st
Indorsement Hospital Center Camp Butner N.C. 17. Jul 45
.

Remarks and thumb print and pay data and insurance notice. Two signatures, his and the personnel officer’s. The end. Goodbye to all that. He had trusted it was goodbye anyway.

Underneath in a crabbed hand, the writing of a ration board worker—
Food 25257—6/27/45 Book 3 and 4
.

He looked blankly at the blackened double sheet. The white lettering went out of focus.

That was the record of 20 months reduced to a few words on a piece of sensitized paper. And it was those 20 months as much as a drop was the ocean and Leo was the measurements of her body.

He dropped the discharge paper on the floor. He remembered quite vividly that as he went out of the discharge center he had stopped in the hall and bent over the water fountain and filled his stomach with cold delicious water.

He pulled out the remaining packet of cards in his wallet. He looked disinterestedly at his notice of classification, his social security card, his official membership card in the Journalism scholastic society, his membership card for the public libraries of New York. He thought of the water coolers in the big library at 42
^nd
Street and remembered the times he had bent over them to drink.

He saw the picture of his father. He remembered looking at it as he had been waiting to go into battle.

He looked at it again.

His father was standing against the country house Erick had been born in. His father had a straw hat on and a light gabardine suit. In his arms Erick rested, small and incommunicable. In front stood the unknown photographer. A moment plucked from the past and put down for all to see.

The sun was shining again. He was in the picture. He was there. He felt the hot sunlight. And Papa held him squirming. Mother or Uncle Bill or someone else was taking the picture. There were other uncles and aunts about. It was a small moment in the turn of the world wherein millions of fathers stood against millions of houses of unrecorded photographers pushed down the little lever while they held their breath and stood as rocklike as they could.
Smile now
.

It was 1929.

Early in the summer. A moment picturized. The man standing with him in his arms is his father. He is a small businessman. He is thinking the market is secure. He does not even dream that in a relatively short time the bottom will fall out of the economic boat and the chaotic waters will rush in. It was the picture of a man about to face a terrible time who didn’t know it was coming. He was alive.

See him there, breathing again. He is young. Happily married so far and his house is his own. He has a good job and he has two children. They are healthy and attractive children. The war is long over and it is a new world and he is peopling it with two more healthy beautiful specimens who will be good for it. So he stands there in the sun with his straw hat and pride in his young son.

He would be bitter and miserable but he did not know of it. He would die in a charity ward after being picked up drunk and dying of pneumonia in an icy street in Brooklyn. He did not know of it. He would die because he would be a drunk but that did not occur to him there under the sun with his baby. It was a terrible thing to look on this picture for he knew what would happen to that man who smiled under his straw hat with his child close to him. He knew the coming misery and his father did not. He was godlike and a clairvoyant and it was a terrible weight to bear.

He wanted to cry. He did cry.

But there were no tears. His chest shook with sobs and his cracking lips trembled. He felt only pity and sorrow for his father. He did not hate him anymore. He did not hate anyone.

Except those fools who were keeping water from him.

Who would not admit that his plan for water as the standard of exchange was the most brilliant plan ever evolved. He could have killed
them
. He would have like to see them running over that plain like those little running dolls they later told him were Germans. And he would hold his breath and smile and grit his teeth with pleasure as he pushed the rifle tight to his shoulder and fired hot slugs over the earth and watched the men leap and start, then crumple into broken heaps on the wet cold ground. And he would feel excitement. He would go out there and get their canteens and drink all the water up. His economic system, why didn’t they approve his …

Everything fluttered to the floor except one thing.

He held a picture of a girl in his hand.

He stared at her and, for a moment, almost forgot that he was thirsty.

He knew the girl.

She wasn’t looking at him. As though, slyly, she knew he would want her to look into his eyes but would not satisfy that longing. As though she were teasing him, playing with him. She was smiling happily and her smile said—I know you’re there but I want to tease.

She had on a black, form-fitting sweater and a twisted pearl necklace.

Her long dark brown hair hung over her broad shoulders. There were smaller twists of pearl fastened to her tiny ears. Her red lips were parted. He would see her even white teeth. Her eyes were bright and happy.

He kept looking at her. Waiting for her to turn.

His mind repeated her name. He ran one finger over the outline of her hair. Oh God, I love you so, his mind whispered to her. I always will. He thought she would give him water if she were here.

He held the picture against his rough cheek and one small tear ran down his cheek and soaked into the print.

I remember you still, his mind told her in the silence. I can never forget.

It was all memory. Remembering events in limbo. Yesterday was a mixture of little things. No continuity. A smile here. A whispered tragedy there. All memories that formed the backdrop for the present play. Nothing that seemed momentous at the time.

It was only later that he looked back on piled up events and wondered how he could have possibly passed through such moments without knowing them for what they were.

Sally
.

Mostly he said it because he was drunk and had never been drunk.

“Self concern is a spawning bitch that whelps all manner of disfigurements. From its narrow, obscene womb call all the multiple inversions a man may destroy himself with, Selah.”

He said it to Lynn Mace. It was April, night.

“It depends,” Lynn said, “On which self of your many selves you’re concerned with.”

“I’m concerned with shit,” Erick said.

“Good deal McNeill,” Lynn said without emphasis.

“Get me another drink,” Erick said.

Lynn got up and went over to the counter. They were in the fraternity playroom, what was called the Rathskellar, what amended became the Rat Cellar. They were in one of the booths, those dimly lit booths that held some sort of intangible capacity to loosen a person’s tongue. Was it the intimacy of it? Or the liquor one did away with while one sat in the booth. Confessionals with beer. That’s what Leo called them. But that was more than a year away.

Erick looked hazily around the room. It was filled with french-cuffed frat boys and their falsied dates. It was Lynn’s fraternity. Erick lived in a room, alone. Lynn had invited him over that Saturday night to look the place over while they talked over plans for the show. Lynn said that Erick might have a few drinks. He said that Erick should contemplate membership. Erick wasn’t contemplating very hard.

“What in the hell?” he inquired as Lynn set down the drinks and slid in across from him, “made you join this junior Bedlam?”

Lynn smiled.

“When I came to college,” he said, “It seemed like a good idea. Now I’m used to it. I’m adjusted.”

* * * *

Lynn had come to the University from New York a year before Erick. With aspiration, dogged effort and a brain, he had piled up a straight A average his first two semesters. He joined the school scholarship society and was the very model of a superior student.

Then he began to believe it was getting him nowhere.

Grades didn’t make all the difference, he discovered. This plus recognition of the string which all the threads of his life had been twisting themselves into caused him to slacken his storming of the academic walls.

He became active in campus affairs, was in touch with various business people who had long offered him jobs upon his graduation. He was a casual intellectual now yet with both feet firmly planted in the practical world. That he still pulled down frequent A’s at least proved that his brain really had something.

Erick first met him while Lynn was editing the campus short story magazine. They printed one of Erick’s stories and Lynn was so impressed with it that he got in touch with Erick and they had been friends ever since.

“I am mildly blotto,” Erick said, “I have never been blotto in my life to any degree. My dear
mama
would shriek out in horror if she could see her little boy mildly blotto. I shrudder—shudder—to think of what added wrinkles I would bestow on that precious brow. I have despised liquor in my day. It struck my dear dead daddy a fell blow. And here I am, nonetheless, mildly blotto. Selah.”

Lynn took a sip from his glass and pulled out a package of cigarettes from his side coat pocket. He flicked a finger against the bottom and one cigarette popped up. He inserted it in between his thin lips and offered the pack to Erick.

“You know I don’t smoke,” Erick said, “Nor care for ladies that do.”

Lynn shook his head. Then he struck the match and held the flame against the end of the cigarette. Smoke veiled his eyes.

“We start rehearsal in a week,” Erick asked.

“Look for a dance director,” Lynn said.

Then he raised his glass a trifle.

“To your first glandular debauch, baby,” he said.

Erick looked at him. “Yes, ma,” he said. Then they drank and putting down his glass, Erick rested his chin on one bunched fist and looked around the room.

“See the people,” he said, “See the funny people. What are they dreaming of?”

“Nothing,” Lynn said, “They have no capacity for dreams.”

“One would think it,” Erick said, “To see them wander aimlessly, idly pressing groins together in the dance and giggling and chatting of baseball scores and thinly-veiled libido. What does it mean?”

“Nothing,” Lynn said, “Absolutely nothing.”

Erick turned to him, ran his eyes over Lynn’s thin, ascetic face, peered into his shifting grey-blue eyes, that moved like living things behind his rimless glasses.

“You are consistent,” Erick said, “If not prolix.”

He turned his gaze then and did his own tour of eye duty around the smoky, noisy room, over the paneled booths crowded with college youth, over the columned floor where danced as many couples as could possibly crowd there and still leave room for the glowering juke box.

“I think it
is
prolix, “Lynn said, “
Nothing
is the most complicated value there is. It entails
everything
canceling itself out. The good balanced by the bad, the intelligent by the doltish. All leaving a vacuum, a dead space of total, lethargic immobility.”

He blew out a cloud of nicotined smoke and adjusted the bridge of his glasses.

“Look at them,” he said, “Unreasoning animals. Ambulating evidence for the mechanical theory of life. Pitiful little summations of inner and outer influence, thoroughly incapable of dealing with themselves, much less others.”

He looked a moment more. “Advocates of the inordinate fuck,” he said slowly and coldly.

Erick chuckled without noise.

“Lynn,” he said, “You would have given Jesus a hard time.”

Lynn smiled at him and Erick pretended not to see what he saw.

“Still have those dreams about shooting men?” Lynn asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Do you?”

Erick shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, then yawned artificially. “Think they mean something?” he asked.

Lynn smiled.

“Emphallically,” he said.

“She had fluff in her belly button,” Erick said ignoring.

“Thumb me another,” Lynn said, looking at Erick carefully.

Erick said, after a moment’s thought.

“She was a man.”

* * * *

She was with Felix Karis, one of the bulkiest quarterbacks in the annals of midwestern college lore. They had been there all evening. Lynn had even pointed out Felix as a prime example of the Neanderthal extant.

Erick hadn’t noticed her.

Now, about eleven or so, Felix was pussy footing it around the floor, two drinks mangled in his great paws, his big, trusting eyes searching for a place to park.

She was following him.

Fate. Erick later guessed that was what he’d have had to call it. The fact that Felix lived on the same floor of the fraternity that Lynn did. And that, as a result, they had a nodding acquaintance. Which Lynn made every effort to suppress.

There was Felix standing by the booth.

“Hiya Mace,” he said, smiling broadly.

Take your fat face away from here, Erick mind requested on the spot.

He and Lynn looked up mutually to examine the rills and ridges of Felix’s broad Polish face.

It wasn’t that Felix was ugly, they later decided. It was just that his features were too rough hewn. As though they had been axed out. There was too much of him from the bushy top of his coarse black hair down to the two chins and including the vase handle ears. It was the sort of a face, Erick thought, that looked as if it had been blasted out of a cliff.

“Hello,” Lynn said with a tone that added, to Erick—Kindly thaw and resolve into a dew, if you please.

“Say, uh, look Mace,” said Felix, fumbling the conversational ball, “Could we, maybe, my date and me, that is, I mean, maybe share your booth? There’s not any place to sit.”