On the Road (10 page)

The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable to keep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life. Every night he drove to work in his ‘35 Ford, punched the clock exactly on time, and sat down at the rolltop desk. He labored painfully over the simple form we all had to fill out every night—rounds, time, what happened, and so on. Then he leaned back and told stories. “You should have been here about two months ago when me and Sledge” (that was another cop, a youngster who wanted to be a Texas Ranger and had to be satisfied with his present lot) “arrested a drunk in Barrack G. Boy, you should have seen the blood fly. I’ll take you over there tonight and show you the stains on the wall. We had him bouncing from one wall to another. First Sledge hit him, and then me, and then he subsided and went quietly. That fellow swore to kill us when he got out of jail—got thirty days. Here it is
sixty
days, and he ain’t showed up.” And this was the big point of the story. They’d put such a fear in him that he was too yellow to come back and try to kill them.

The old cop went on, sweetly reminiscing about the horrors of Alcatraz. “We used to march ‘em like an Army platoon to breakfast. Wasn’t one man out of step. Everything went like clockwork. You should have seen it. I was a guard there for twenty-two years. Never had any trouble. Those boys knew we meant business. A lot of fellows get soft guarding prisoners, and they’re the ones that usually get in trouble. Now you take you—from what I’ve been observing about you, you seem to me a little bit too leenent with the men.” He raised his pipe and looked at me sharp. “They take advantage of that, you know. ”

I knew that. I told him I wasn’t cut out to be a cop.

“Yes, but that’s the job that you
applied
for. Now you got to make up your mind one way or the other, or you’ll never get anywhere. It’s your duty. You’re sworn in. You can’t compromise with things like this. Law and order’s got to be kept.”

I didn’t know what to say; he was right; but all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

The other cop, Sledge, was tall, muscular, with a black-haired crew-cut and a nervous twitch in his neck—like a boxer who’s always punching one fist into another. He rigged himself out like a Texas Ranger of old. He wore a revolver down low, with ammunition belt, and carried a small quirt of some kind, and pieces of leather hanging everywhere, like a walking torture chamber: shiny shoes, low-hanging jacket, cocky hat, everything but boots. He was always showing me holds—reaching down under my crotch and lifting me up nimbly. In point of strength I could have thrown him clear to the ceiling with the same hold, and I knew it well; but I never let him know for fear he’d want a wrestling match. A wrestling match with a guy like that would end up in shooting. I’m sure he was a better shot; I’d never had a gun in my life. It scared me even to load one. He desperately wanted to make arrests. One night we were alone on duty and he came back red-faced mad.

“I told some boys in there to keep quiet and they’re still making noise. I told them twice. I always give a man two chances. Not three. You come with me and I’m going back there and arrest them.”

“Well, let me give them a third chance,” I said. “I’ll talk to them.”

“No, sir, I never gave a man more than two chances.” I sighed. Here we go. We went to the offending room, and Sledge opened the door and told everybody to file out. It was embarrassing. Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night? But Sledge wanted to prove something. He made sure to bring me along in case they jumped him. They might have. They were all brothers, all from Alabama. We strolled back to the station, Sledge in front and me in back.

One of the boys said to me, “Tell that crotch-eared mean-ass to take it easy on us. We might get fired for this and never get to Okinawa.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

In the station I told Sledge to forget it. He said, for everybody to hear, and blushing, “I don’t give anybody no more than two chances.”

“What the hail,” said the Alabaman, “what difference does it make? We might lose our jobs.” Sledge said nothing and filled out the arrest forms. He arrested only one of them; he called the prowl car in town. They came and took him away. The other brothers walked off sullenly. “What’s Ma going to say?” they said. One of them came back to me. “You tell that Tex-ass sonofabitch if my brother ain’t out of jail tomorrow night he’s going to get his ass fixed.” I told Sledge, in a neutral way, and he said nothing. The brother was let off easy and nothing happened. The contingent shipped out; a new wild bunch came in. If it hadn’t been for Remi Boncœur I wouldn’t have stayed at this job two hours.

But Remi Boncœur and I were on duty alone many a night, and that’s when everything jumped. We made our first round of the evening in a leisurely way, Remi trying all the doors to see if they were locked and hoping to find one unlocked. He’d say, “For years I’ve an idea to develop a dog into a superthief who’d go into these guys’ rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I’d train him to take nothing but green money; I’d make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly possible way, I’d train him to take only twenties.” Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked about that dog for weeks. Only once he found an unlocked door. I didn’t like the idea, so I sauntered on down the hall. Remi stealthily opened it up. He came face to face with the barracks supervisor. Remi hated that man’s face. He asked me, “What’s the name of that Russian author you’re always talking about—the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he found in a garbage pail?” This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of Dostoevski. “Ah, that’s it—that’s
it
—Dostioffski. A man with a face like that supervisor can only have one name—it’s Dostioffski.” The only unlocked door he ever found belonged to Dostioffski. D. was asleep when he heard someone fiddling with his doorknob. He got up in his pajamas. He came to the door looking twice as ugly as usual. When Remi opened it he saw a haggard face suppurated with hatred and dull fury.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“I was only trying this door. I thought this was the—ah—mop room. I was looking for a mop.”

“What do you
mean
you were looking for a mop?”

“Well—ah.”

And I stepped up and said, “One of the men puked in the hall upstairs. We have to mop it up.”

“This is
not
the mop room. This is
my
room. Another incident like this and I’ll have you fellows investigated and thrown out! Do you understand me clearly?”

“A fellow puked upstairs,” I said again.

“The mop room is down the hall. Down there.” And he pointed, and waited for us to go and get a mop, which we did, and foolishly carried it upstairs.

I said, “Goddammit, Remi, you’re always getting us into trouble. Why don’t you lay off? Why do you have to steal all the time?”

“The world owes me a few things, that’s all. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune. You go on talking like that and I’m going to start calling you Dostioffski.”

Remi was just like a little boy. Somewhere in his past, in his lonely schooldays in France, they’d taken everything from him; his stepparents just stuck him in schools and left him there; he was browbeaten and thrown out of one school after another; he walked the French roads at night devising curses out of his innocent stock of words. He was out to get back everything he’d lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever.

The barracks cafeteria was our meat. We looked around to make sure nobody was watchihg, and especially to see if any of our cop friends were lurking about to check on us; then I squatted down, and Remi put a foot on each shoulder and up he went. He opened the window, which was never locked since he saw to it in the evenings, scrambled through, and came down on the flour table. I was a little more agile and just jumped and crawled in. Then we went to the soda fountain. Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. Then we got ice-cream boxes and stuffed them, poured chocolate syrup over and sometimes strawberries too, then walked around in the kitchens, opened iceboxes, to see what we could take home in our pockets. I often tore off a piece of roast beef and wrapped it in a napkin. “You know what President Truman said,” Remi would say. “We must cut down on the cost of living.”

One night I waited a long time as he filled a huge box full of groceries. Then we couldn’t get it through the window. Remi had to unpack everything and put it back. Later in the night, when he went off duty and I was all alone on the base, a strange thing happened. I was taking a walk along the old canyon trail, hoping to meet a deer (Remi had seen deer around, that country being wild even in 1947), when I heard a frightening noise in the dark. It was a huffing and puffing. I thought it was a rhinoceros coming for me in the dark. I grabbed my gun. A tall figure appeared in the canyon gloom; it had an enormous head. Suddenly I realized it was Remi with a huge box of groceries on his shoulder. He was moaning and groaning from the enormous weight of it. He’d found the key to the cafeteria somewhere and had got his groceries out the front door. I said, “Remi, I thought you were home; what the hell are you doing?”

And he said, “Paradise, I have told you several times what President Truman said,
we must cut down on the cost of living.”
And I heard him huff and puff into the darkness. I’ve already described that awful trail back to our shack, up hill and down dale. He hid the groceries in the tall grass and came back to me. “Sal, I just can’t make it alone. I’m going to divide it into two boxes and you’re going to help me.”

“But I’m on duty.”

“I’ll watch the place while you’re gone. Things are getting rough all around. We’ve just got to make it the best way we can, and that’s all there is to it.” He wiped his face. “Whoo! I’ve told you time and time again, Sal, that we’re buddies, and we’re in this thing together. There’s just no two ways about it. The Dostioff skis, the cops, the Lee Anns, all the evil skulls of this world, are out for our skin. It’s up to us to see that nobody pulls any schemes on us. They’ve got a lot more up their sleeves besides a dirty arm. Remember that. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.”

I finally asked, “Whatever are we going to do about shipping out?” We’d been doing these things for ten weeks. I was making fifty-five bucks a week and sending my aunt an average of forty. I’d spent only one evening in San Francisco in all that time. My life was wrapped in the shack, in Remi’s battles with Lee Ann, and in the middle of the night at the barracks.

Remi was gone off in the dark to get another box. I struggled with him on that old Zorro road. We piled up the groceries a mile high on Lee Ann’s kitchen table. She woke up and rubbed her eyes.

“You know what President Truman said?” She was delighted. I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked. The other cops were getting suspicious of us; they saw it in our eyes; they understood with unfailing instinct what was on our minds. Years of experience had taught them the likes of Remi and me.

In the daytime Remi and I went out with the gun and tried to shoot quail in the hills. Remi sneaked up to within three feet of the clucking birds and let go a blast of the .32. He missed. His tremendous laugh roared over the California woods and over America. “The time has come for you and me to go and see the Banana King.”

It was Saturday; we got all spruced up and went down to the bus station on the crossroads. We rode into San Francisco and strolled through the streets. Remi’s huge laugh resounded everywhere we went. “You must write a story about the Banana King,” he warned me. “Don’t pull any tricks on the old maestro and write about something else. The Banana King is your meat. There stands the Banana King.” The Banana King was an old man selling bananas on the corner. I was completely bored. But Remi kept punching me in the ribs and even dragging me along by the collar. “When you write about the Banana King you write about the human-interest things of life.” I told him I didn’t give a damn about the Banana King. “Until you learn to realize the importance of the Banana King you will know absolutely nothing about the human-interest things of the world,” said Remi emphatically.

There was an old rusty freighter out in the bay that was used as a buoy. Remi was all for rowing out to it, so one afternoon Lee Ann packed a lunch and we hired a boat and went out there. Remi brought some tools. Lee Ann took all her clothes off and lay down to sun herself on the flying bridge. I watched her from the poop. Remi went clear down to the boiler rooms below, where rats scurried around, and began hammering and banging away for copper lining that wasn’t there. I sat in the dilapidated officer’s mess. It was an old, old ship and had been beautifully appointed, with scrollwork in the wood, and built-in seachests. This was the ghost of the San Francisco of Jack London. I dreamed at the sunny mess-board. Rats ran in the pantry. Once upon a time there’d been a blue-eyed sea captain dining in here.

I joined Remi in the bowels below. He yanked at everything loose. “Not a thing. I thought there’d be copper, I thought there’d be at least an old wrench or two. This ship’s been stripped by a bunch of thieves.” It had been standing in the bay for years. The copper had been stolen by a hand that was a hand no more.

I said to Remi, “I’d love to sleep in this old ship some night when the fog comes in and the thing creaks and you hear the big B-0 of the buoys.”

Remi was astounded; his admiration for me doubled. “Sal, I’ll pay you five dollars if you have the nerve to do that. Don’t you realize this thing may be haunted by the ghosts of old sea captains? I’ll not only pay you five, I’ll row you out and pack you a lunch and lend you blankets and candle.”