Nebraska (4 page)

After a while Frankie clammed up and then decided he wanted a little exercise and removed his tie and pink coat as he walked past the USO stand to the gym equipment. He performed two pull-ups on the chalked high bar, biting his cigarette, then amused a nurse in the first-aid station with his impressions of Peter Lorre, Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore.

“I love hearing men talk,” the nurse said. “That's what I miss most.”

“Maybe I could close this door,” Frankie said.

“You can't kiss me, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not fast.”

“Maybe I should amscray, then.”

“No!” the nurse said, and shocked herself with her insistence. “Oh, shoot.” She turned her back and walked to the sickbed. “Go ahead and close the door.”

Anchored in Playland's twenty-foot waters were five diving platforms fixed as star points radiating out from a giant red diving tower with swooping steel buttresses and three levels, the topmost being a crow's nest that was flagged with snapping red pennants. It reached one hundred feet above the surface and was closed off except for the professionals paid to somersault dangerously from the perch at two and four in the afternoon, nine o'clock at night.

And there Gordon had his sister and her girlfriend row him after he'd wearied of looking for Bijou. The boat banged into a steel brace, and the corporal left his cane and walked off the board seat to a ladder slat. He ascended to the first elevation and saw only shivering children who leaned to see that the bottom was unpopulated, then worked up their courage and leapt, shouting paratrooper jump calls. At the second elevation was a short man with gray hair and a very brief suit and skin nearly chocolate brown. The man paused at the edge, adjusting his toes, and then jackknifed off, and Gordon bent out to see him veer into the water sixty feet down. Gordon wanted to recoup, to do something masculine and reckless and death-defying. He yelled to the platform below him, “Anybody down there?” and there was no answer. Then he saw a woman in a white bathing suit like Bijou's underwater near the tower. Her blond hair eddied as she tarried there below the surface. Gordon grinned.

His sister and her girlfriend were spellbound. They saw Gordon carefully roll up his pant cuffs and yank his belt tight through his brass buckle clasp. They saw him simply walk off the
second level into a careening drop that lasted almost two seconds. A geyser shot up twenty feet when he smacked the water, then the surface ironed out and his sister worried; finally he burst up near the boat.

“Something's down there!”

“What is?”

“Don't know!” Gordon swam over, wincing with pain, and when he gripped the boat, blood braided down his fist.

Bijou strapped on a white rubber bathing cap and pushed her hair under it as she tiptoed on the hot sand. She splashed water onto her arms and chest, and then crouched into the pool and swam overhand toward a rocking diving platform. It floated on groaning red drums that lifted and smacked down and lifted again as boys dived from the boards. Bijou climbed a ladder and dangled her legs from a diving platform carpeted with drenched rope. She removed her cap, tossed her blond hair, ignored the oglers who hung near the ladder. Her breasts ached and she wished Gordon could somehow rub them without making her crazy.

The diving platform had sloped because a crowd took up a corner, staring toward the diving tower. Bijou saw that the ferry had stopped and that its passengers had gathered at the rail under the canopy, gaping in the same direction. Four lifeguards hung on a rowboat, struggling with something, as a policeman with a gaff hook stood in the boat and Gordon clinched the anchor lock with a bandaged right hand. Gordon! Two swimmers disappeared under water, and the policeman hooked the gaff and they heaved up a black snapping turtle as large as a manhole cover and so heavy that the gaff bowed like a fishing rod. The turtle's thorny neck hooked madly about and its beak clicked as it struck at the gaff and its
clawed webs snagged at whatever they could, as if they wanted to rake out an eye. Bijou's boyfriend manipulated a canvas mailbag over the turtle's head and nicked it over the turtle's horned shell. The policeman heard a woman shriek, then saw the hubbub and the astonished crowds on the ferry and diving platforms, and he kicked the turtle onto the boat's bottom and said, “Hide it. Hurry up, hide it.”

That night the exhibition palace burned so many light bulbs that signs at the gate warned visitors not to linger too close to the marquee or stare at the electrical dazzle without the green cellophane sunglasses available at the ticket booth. Limousines seeped along an asphalt cul-de-sac that was redolent with honey-suckle, violets, and dahlias, and at least forty taxicabs idled against the curb, the drivers hanging elbows out or sitting against their fenders. Gordon stood on a sidewalk imbedded with gold sparkle and laced his unbandaged fingers with Bijou's as Frankie ostentatiously paid for their admission. Then Bijou left for the powder room with her evening gown in a string-tied box, a pair of white pumps in her hand.

Frankie sauntered inside with Gordon, commenting on the sponge of the burgundy lobby carpet, the vast dance floor's uncommon polish, the vapored fragrances shot overhead from jet instruments tucked into the ceiling's scrolled molding. Bijou's two escorts selected a corner cocktail table and listened to the Butch Seaton Orchestra in sleepy, mopey solitude, without criticism or remark. Then Bijou glided down the ballroom stairs in her glamorous white gown, looking like Playland's last and best creation, Playland's finishing touch, and the men rose up like dukes.

Gordon danced with her and Frankie cut in. Frankie murmured at her ear over sodas, and Gordon asked Bijou to accom-
pany him to the dance floor. The three bandied conversations during breaks, then music would start and they'd detach again. Male hands sought Bijou's hands as she sat; songs were solicited for her from the orchestra; Gordon fanned a napkin near her when it warmed.

By ten o'clock the great ballroom was jammed. Young Marines introduced themselves and danced with uneasy strangers, a sergeant danced with a hatcheck girl, some women danced with each other as the Butch Seaton Orchestra played “Undecided,” “Boo Hoo,” “Tangerine.” Bijou stood near the stage, her boyfriend's hand at her back, his thumb independently diddling her zipper as a crooner sang, “I love you, there's nothing to hide. It's better than burning inside. I love you, no use to pretend. There! I've said it again!” Sheet music turned. A man licked his saxophone reed. The crooner retreated from the microphone as woodwinds took over for a measure. A mirrored sunburst globe rotated on the ceiling, wiping light spots across a man's shoulder, a woman's face, a tasseled drape, a chair. The orchestra members wore white tuxedos with red paper roses in their lapels. Gordon's fingers gingered up Bijou's bare back to her neck, where fine blonde hairs had come undone from an ivory barrette. Bijou shivered and then gently swiveled into Gordon, not meaning to dance but moving with him when he did. His shoes nudged hers, his khaki uniform smelled of a spicy after-shave that Bijou regretted, his pressure against her body made her feel secure and loving.

The music stopped and Gordon said, “Let's ditch your cousin.”

“How mean!”

“The guy gives me the creeps.”

“Still.”

Gordon thumped his cane on the floor and weighed his
hankerings. “How about if you kissed me a big sloppy one right on my ear?”

Bijou giggled. “Not
here.
”

“Maybe later, okay?”

Butch Seaton gripped his baton in both hands and bent into a microphone as a woman in a red evening dress with spangles on it like fish scales crossed to the microphone that the crooner was readjusting lower with a wing nut. The orchestra leader suggested, “And now, Audrey, how about Duke Ellington's soulful tune, ‘Mood Indigo'?”

Audrey seemed amenable.

Bijou asked, “I wonder where Frankie is.”

“Maybe he was mixing with his kind and somebody flushed him away.” The corporal's little joke pleased him, and he was near a guffaw when his nose began to bleed. He spattered drops on his bandaged hand and Bijou's wrist and shoe before he could slump, embarrassed, on a chair with a handkerchief pressed to his nostrils. He remarked, “This day is one for the record books, Bijou. This has been a really weird day.”

Bijou complained that she was yukky with Gordon's blood, and she slipped off to the powder room. Gordon watched her disappear among the couples on the dance floor, and then Frankie flopped down on a folding chair next to him.

“How's the schnozzola?” Frankie asked. Gordon removed the handkerchief, and Frankie peered like a vaudeville doctor. “Looks dammed up to me.” He slapped Gordon's crippled knee. “I hereby declare you in perfect health. Come on, let's drink to it.”

Frankie showed him to a gentleman's saloon, and Gordon paid for a rye whiskey and a Coca-Cola with a simoleon that had grains of sand stuck to it. The Playland glassware was, of course, unblemished with water spots.

Frankie said, “I was a radio actor in New York before the war. I'm coming back from a screen test in Hollywood. Another gangster part. That's about all I do: gunsels, crooks, schlemiels.”

“No kidding,” the corporal said. He rebandaged his right hand and sulked about his miserable afternoon.

Frankie stared at an eighteenth-century painting of a prissy hunter with two spaniels sniffing at his white leggings, a turkey strangled in his fist. “What a jerk, huh? Here I am, horning in on your girl, and I expect chitchat from you.”

“Well, don't expect me to be palsy-walsy. I'll shoot the breeze, okay. But I'm not about to be your pal just because you're Bijou's cousin from Hollywood and radio land.”

Frankie scrooched forward on his bar stool. “You oughta see things with my eyes. You take Bijou, for instance. She's a dish, a real hot patootie in anybody's book, but she ain't all she wrote, Gordo, not by a long shot. You and Bijou, you come to Playland, you dance to the music, swallow all this phonusbalonus, and you think you've experienced life to the hilt. Well, I got news for you, GI. You haven't even licked the spoon. You don't know what's out there, what's available.” Frankie slid off the bar stool and hitched up his pink pleated pants. “You want a clue, you want a little taste of the hot stuff, you call on Cousin Frankie. I gotta go to the can.”

Gordon hunched over his Coca-Cola glass and scowled down into the ice, then swiveled to call to Frankie as he left the saloon, but the schlemiel wasn't there.

Gordon was loitering in the burgundy lobby, slapping his garrison cap in his hand, when Bijou came out of the powder room. He asked, “Do you want to see the moon?”

“Where's Frankie?”

“Who cares?”

A great crush of party goers was pushing against the lobby's glass doors, yelling to get in, each wearing green cellophane sunglasses. Gordon and Bijou exited and a couple was admitted; screams rose and then subsided as the big door closed.

The two strolled past a penny arcade, a calliope, a gypsy fortune-teller's tent, a lavender emporium where chimpanzees in toddler clothes roller-skated and shambled. At a booth labeled Delights, Bijou observed a man spin apples in hot caramel and place them on cupcake papers to cool, and she seemed so fascinated that the corporal bought her one. Bijou chewed the candied apple as they ambled past the stopped rocket ship, an empty French café, a darkened wedding chapel. They walked near pools where great frogs croaked on green lily pads that were as large as place mats, and gorgeous flowers like white cereal bowls drifted in slow turns. The couple strolled into gardens of petunias, loblolly, blue iris, philodendrons, black orchids. Exciting perfumes craved attention, petals detached and fluttered down, a white carnation shattered at the brush of Bijou's hem and piled in shreds on the walk, the air hummed and hushed and whined. Cat's-eye marbles layered a path that veered off into gardens with lurid green leaves overhead, and this walk they took with nervous stomachs and the near panic of erotic desire. The moon vanished and the night cooled. Creepers overtook lampposts and curled up over benches; the wind made the weeping willows sigh like a child in sleep. Playland was everywhere they looked, insisting on itself.

Then Gordon and Bijou were boxed in by black foliage. The corporal involved himself with Bijou and they kissed as they heard the orchestra playing the last dance. Bijou shivered and moved to the music and her boyfriend woodenly followed, his cane slung from a belt loop, his bandaged right hand on her hip. Her cheek nuzzled into his shoulder. His shoes scruffed the grass
in a two-step. The music was clarinets and trombones and the crooner singing about heartache, but under that, as from a cellar, Bijou could pick out chilling noises, so secret that they could barely be noticed: of flesh ripped from bone, claws scratching madly at wood, the clink of a cigarette lighter.

Bijou felt the corporal bridle and cease dancing, and then start up again. He danced her around slowly until she could see what he'd seen, but Bijou closed her eyes and said, “Forget about him. Pretend he's not there.”

The Killers

H
is name is Rex. He says he was fifteen his very first time, and says his boss flew back in his chair like he'd been hit in the chest with a fence post. Rex says he worked in the basement wash rack until he got his chance, then he slapped the chamois twice across the hood and watched the boss close up. The garage door rang down on chain pulleys, then the boss rode the belt lift up to his office. Rex opened the car door and lay across the transmission hump to jerk the shot-gun out from under the springs. He zipped up his cracked leather coat and rode the lift up to the parking lot's office. He punched himself out on the time clock, wrapped the shotgun up in coveralls, and slid it under the bench. His boss, who was Art, had his pants unbelted, unzipped, tucking in his shirt. He said good night. This was 1960.

Rex walked up the hill to the lunchroom. And down by the auditorium, Ron dropped a cigar at his shoe. Ron was the man who got him the job. Rex says the cigar ash blew red across the sidewalk.

At the lunchroom, Rex ate a fried ham on rye. It used to be a trolley, the lunchroom. Green and yellow and too much light. A man at the end of the counter licked egg yolk off his plate. Rex drank milk until the news came on, then paid the cook with two bills and told him thanks for the change. And no tip.

The guy who got him the job was still down the street. He bent over the match in his hand. Cigar smoke sailed up when he lifted his head. Ron gave him the go-ahead.

Rex stood next to the time clock with the shotgun in his hands and the coveralls on his boot tops. The time clock chunked through four minutes, and I guess Rex thought about how some things would stop and some things would just be beginning. He walked to the office in his stocking feet. When he opened the door, Art looked up.

“I thought you were gone,” Art said.

Rex swung the shotgun up and dropped it down on the desktop, cracking the glass. He centered the barrel some with his hip. Art grabbed for it quick and then pitched back in a mess while the big noise shook the windows and gray smoke screwed up to the overhead vent. The chair was pushed back three inches. You could see the skid on the tiles. Art sat there like he was worn-out, his glasses cockeyed on his face. Rex turned out the lights. Luckily he saw how his socks picked up the dirt, so he got out a mop and washed the floor, then put on his boots and locked up. He leaned the shotgun next to the drainpipe and walked down the hill, his hands clasped on top of his stocking cap.

Ron dropped the envelope out of his pocket and was gone.

It was in 1940 that Max leaned across the seat and opened the car door. The man at the corner stooped and looked at him, holding his coat flaps together. “You, huh?”

“Get in.”

They drove in silence for a while. Al bit a cuticle and looked at his finger. Al got a cigarette out and lit it with the green coil lighter from the dashboard. The smoke rolled up the window glass and out through the opening where it was chopped off by
the wind. At a stoplight Al said, “Look at my hands.” He held them, shaking, over the dash. “Would you look at that?”

Max said, “To tell you the truth, I'm a little jumpy too.”

The man's eyes were glassy. “You know what I've always been scared of ever since I can remember? I was always afraid I'd wet my pants.”

Max smiled.

Al looked out the window. “You think it's funny, but it's not.”

“I'll let you relieve yourself first. How would that be?”

“That'd be sweet.”

They worked in and out of traffic and found a parking place. Al got out and straightened his coat. He pressed his hair in place in the window reflection. Max got out, flattening a gray muffler against his chest, then buttoning his black wool coat. He put his key in the door and turned it. They both wore light-colored homburg hats. Al tied both his shoes on the bumper.

“How far is it?” he asked.

“Three blocks.”

They walked in step on the sidewalk. Max held his hat in the wind.

“What are you using?”

“The Smith and Wesson.” He put up the collar on his coat. “That okay with you?”

“Oh, that's just swell, Max. You're a real buddy.”

Al stopped to light another cigarette. He coughed badly for a long time, leaning with his arms against a building, hacking between his shoes, then wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. Al shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched forward. The cigarette hung from his lip. “Cold, that's all.” Smoke steamed over his face. “I feel it in my ticker when I cough.”

“You ought to have it looked at,” Max said.

“You're a regular funny boy today, aren't ya?”

They turned left at the corner and walked into a lunchroom that used to be a trolley. A bell jingled over their heads. They sat on stools at the counter and ordered coffee and egg-salad sandwiches. They were the only customers.

“Do you remember the Swede?”

Max nodded.

The counterman turned over the sign that read
CLOSED,
then got out a broom and began sweeping the floor. He swept under their feet as they ate. Max turned on his stool.

“Is there a place where a fella could get a newspaper?”

“There's a booth at the corner,” the counterman said.

Max handed him a dollar bill that the counterman put in his shirt pocket. “Which one you want?”

“Make it the
Trib
.”

He rested his broom against the counter.

“Walk slow.”

When the counterman was out the door, Al put down his cup of coffee. “He coulda stayed.”

“I know.”

“I personally like having people around. Afterward they'll begin to imagine things and get you all wrong in their heads.”

Max used a toothpick on all of his teeth. Al put two sticks of chewing gum into his mouth. He crumpled up the wrappers.

“You know how it works,” Max said. “You get the call and she says do this, do that. What do you say? She got the wrong number? You do what you have to do. Nothing personal about it.” He looked at Al's face in the mirror behind the counter. “What am I telling you this for? You know all the rules.” Max got off his stool. “You said you wanted to visit the men's room.”

They walked to the back of the place, Max following behind. He stood on a chair to switch on a small radio and turn
it up loud. Then he went into the gray lavatory where Al was washing his hands and face. He looked at Max in the spotted mirror. Max was pushing down the fingers of his gloves. He asked, “What'd you do, anyway?”

Al shrugged. “I started taking it easy.” He dried his hands with his handkerchief. “I burned myself out as a kid. I lost my vitality.”

Max opened his coat. “Do you want to sit down?”

The man sat down under the sink.

Max crouched close, reaching into his shoulder holster. “Waiting's the worst of it. You don't have to do that now.” He felt for the heartbeat under Al's shirt, and Al watched him press the Smith and Wesson's muzzle there. Max fired once and the body jerked dead. The arms and legs started jiggling. They were still doing that when Max walked out and closed the men's room door.

He's short, for one thing, so the cuffs on his jeans are rolled up big and he folds a manila paper up four times to put in the heels of his boots. He chews gum instead of brushing his teeth like he should, and pulls his belt so tight that there're tucks and pleats everywhere. He washes his hair with hard yellow soap, then it's rose oil or Vitalis, and he combs it sometimes three or four times before he gets it right. He keeps aspirin in his locker. He says he falls asleep each night with a washrag on his forehead. He punched a tattoo in himself with a ballpoint pen, but it's only a blue star on his wrist and mostly his watch covers it. You can go through school and see his name everywhere: Rex on a wall painted over in beige, Rex on the men's room door, Rex on a desk seat bottom when it's up, Rex Adams stomped out in the snow. He eats oranges at lunch—even the peel!—and gets D's in all his subjects, including music and phys ed. If he comes
to sock hops, he just stands there like a squirrel, or like he's waiting for lady's choice. He's always giving me the eye. Especially when I wear dresses. He doesn't have a father or listen to records or play sports. He was the first one in school with a motorcycle, which is chrome and black and waxed and which he saved up for with money from the parking lot. His favorite pastime is collecting magazine pictures, but there's only one taped over his bed; it's from the fifties, from
Life
,
about a gangster washed up out of Lake Michigan and swelled up yeasty in his clothes. He says the thing he remembers most is the way the blood seeped into the creases of Art's pants and dripped to the floor like out of a tap when it's not tight. He's got a gun. He's the only Rex in school. He's not cute at all. His shirts all smell like potatoes.

The Swede? That's an old story.

Max had dressed at the hotel window. Leaves rattled in the alley. He crossed his neck with a silk muffler and buttoned a black overcoat tightly across his chest and put on gloves and a derby hat. He met the other man on the street. They both held their hats as they walked.

“I see you got it,” Max said.

The man, whose name was Al, said nothing but kept one hand in his pocket.

“Good,” Max said.

This was many years ago. This was 1926.

They sat at the counter of Henry's lunchroom facing the mirror. A streetlight came on outside the window. There was a counterman and a black cook and a kid in a cracked leather jacket and cap at the far end of the bar. He had been talking with the counterman when they came in.

Max read the menu and ordered pork tenderloin, but they
weren't serving that until six. They were serving sandwiches. He ordered chicken croquettes but that was dinner too.

“I'll take ham and eggs,” Al said.

“Give me bacon and eggs,” said Max.

They ate with their gloves on, then Al got down from his stool and took the cook and the boy back to the kitchen and tied them up with towels. Max stared in the mirror that ran along the back of the counter. Al used a catsup bottle to prop open the slit that dishes passed through into the kitchen.

“Listen, bright boy,” Al said to the kid. “Stand a little further along the bar.”

Then he said, “You move a little to the left, Max.”

For a while Max talked about the Swede. He said they were killing him for a friend.

At six-fifteen a streetcar motorman came in, but he went on up the street. Somebody else came in, and the counterman made him a ham and egg sandwich and wrapped it up in oiled paper.

“He can cook and everything,” Max said. “You'd make some girl a nice wife.”

Max watched the clock. At seven-ten, when the Swede still hadn't shown, Max got off his stool. Al came out from the kitchen hiding the shotgun under his coat.

“So long, bright boy,” Al said to the counterman. “You got a lot of luck.”

“That's the truth,” Max said. “You ought to play the races.”

They went out the door and crossed the street.

“That was sloppy,” Al said.

“What about where he lives?”

“I don't know this town from apples.”

They sat down on the stoop of a white frame house. Inside,
a man and woman were leaning toward a crystal radio. There were doilies on their chairs, and the man slapped his knee when he laughed. Part of a newspaper blew past Max's shoes. He snatched it and opened it up. Al nudged him when the kid in the leather jacket came out of Henry's. They followed the kid up beside the car tracks, turned at the arc light down a side street, and stood in the yard across from Hirsch's rooming house. The kid pushed the bell and a woman let him in.

“The Swede'll come out looking for us,” Al said.

“No he won't,” Max said. “He'll just sit there and stew.”

Al stared across at the second-story window.

After a while the downstairs door opened again and the woman said good night. The kid walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc lights, and then along the car tracks to Henry's lunchroom.

The two men crossed over to the rooming-house yard. Al stepped over a low fence and went around the back. Max walked up the two steps and opened the door. He stood in the hallway and listened and then he climbed a flight of stairs. He softly walked back to the end of a corridor. Al came up the rear stairs from the kitchen. He unbuttoned his coat and cradled the shot-gun.

Max knocked on the door but there wasn't an answer.

He turned the handle and pushed the door with his toe. They walked in and closed the door behind them. The Swede was lying on a bed with all his clothes on, just staring at the wall. He used to be a prizefighter and was too long for the bed. He turned to look at them and Al fired.

Rex got the call on a Thursday. His mom was just home from work at the grocery store and he was in his T-shirt and jeans eating a TV dinner and reading a newspaper spread over
the ottoman and not paying me any attention. His mom called him to the phone, said it was some man. Ron, it must've been. He put his finger in his ear and turned with the phone, but he still had to ask the guy to repeat this and that. Rex went ahead and jotted everything down on the calendar from church, then tore off the month and folded it up to fit in his leather-braid wallet. Then he sat down on the couch and belched, he's so uncouth. He looked at his TV dinner with the crumb custard still in the dish. Then he got up to run the sink faucet over it and stuff the tray down in the trash. His mom was cooking at the electric range when he was in there. She moved the teakettle onto another coil and dried her hands on her apron and turned around, kind of smiling. He swung his hand back like he was going to slap her, and she screamed and hid under her arms. When he didn't hit her and just grinned instead, she walked right out of the kitchen, heavy on her heels. She was careful around him the majority of the time. You couldn't help but notice.

So Max was an old man now, with a trimmed white beard and brown eyes and size eleven shoes and trouble sleeping nights. He combed his thin hair forward to hide his bald spot. His face was baked red from the sun, his shirts were open at the collar, and he could no longer drink wine. When he last met the man in the black suit, they talked about quail hunting and heavyweight boxing and fishing for marlin off the Keys. Then the man passed a paper to Max, which he signed with a strong cross to the X and a period at the end of his name. They sent a check twice a year. As he stood up he said, “Let me defend the title against all the good young new ones.”