Run With the Hunted (18 page)

“Sure, but you won't be able to get it up after all that work.”

“I'll get it up.”

“I'll be here at closing. If you can still stand up, then you can have it for nothing!”

“I'll be standing
tall
, baby.”

Helen walked back to the crapper.

“Shot of whiskey, Tommy.”

“Hey, take it easy,” said Billy-Boy, “or you'll never finish that job tonight.”

“Billy, if I don't finish you keep your five.”

“It's a deal. All you people hear that?”

“We heard you, Billy, you cheap ass.”

“One for the road, Tommy.”

Tommy gave me the whiskey. I drank it and went to work. I drove myself on. After a number of whiskeys I had the three sets of blinds up and shining.

“All right, Billy, pay up.”

“You're not finished.”

“What?”

“There's three more windows in the back room.”

“The back room?”

“The back room. The party room.”

Billy-Boy showed me the back room. There were three more windows, three more sets of blinds.

“I'll settle for two-fifty, Billy.”

“No, you got to do them all or no pay.”

I got my buckets, dumped the water, put in clean water, soap, then took down a set of blinds. I pulled the slats out, put them on a table and stared at them.

Jim stopped on his way to the crapper. “What's the matter?”

“I can't go another slat.”

When Jim came out of the crapper he went to the bar and brought back his beer. He began cleaning the blinds.

“Jim, forget it.”

I went to the bar, got another whiskey. When I got back one of the girls was taking down a set of blinds. “Be careful, don't cut yourself,” I told her.

A few minutes later there were four or five people back there talking and laughing, even Helen. They were all working on the blinds. Soon nearly everybody in the bar was back there. I worked in two more whiskeys. Finally the blinds were finished and hanging. It hadn't taken very long. They sparkled. Billy-Boy came in:

“I don't have to pay you.”

“The job's finished.”

“But you didn't finish it.”

“Don't be a cheap shit, Billy,” somebody said.

Billy-Boy dug out the $5 and I took it. We moved to the bar. “A drink for everybody!” I laid the $5 down. “And one for me too.”

Tommy went around pouring drinks.

I drank my drink and Tommy picked up the $5.

“You owe the bar $3.15.”

“Put it on the tab.”

“O.K., what's your last name?”

“Chinaski.”

“You heard the one about the Polack who went to the outhouse?”

“Yes.”

Drinks came my way until closing time. After the last one I looked around. Helen had slipped out. Helen had lied.

Just like a bitch, I thought, afraid of the long hard ride …

I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me. I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.

When I arrived in St. Louis it was still very cold, about to snow, and I found a room in a nice clean place, a room on the second floor, in the back. It was early evening and I was having one of my depressive fits so I went to bed early and somehow managed to sleep.

When I awakened in the morning it was very cold. I was shivering uncontrollably. I got up and found that one of the windows was open. I closed the window and went back to bed. I began to feel nauseated. I managed to sleep another hour, then awakened. I got up, dressed, barely made it to the hall bathroom and vomited. I undressed and got back into bed. Soon there was a knock on the door. I didn't answer. The knocking continued. “Yes?” I asked.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Can we come in?”

“Come in.”

There were two girls. One was a bit on the fat side but scrubbed, shining, in a flowery pink dress. She had a kind face. The other wore a wide tight belt that accentuated her very good figure. Her hair was long, dark, and she had a cute nose; she wore high heels, had perfect legs, and wore a white low cut blouse. Her eyes were dark brown, very dark, and they kept looking at me, amused, very amused. “I'm Gertrude,” she said, “and this is Hilda.”

Hilda managed to blush as Gertrude moved across the room toward that dark hair. She walked off down the hall, leaving the door ajar.

I took the salt and pepper, seasoned the broth, broke the crackers into it, and spooned it into my illness.

After losing several typewriters to pawnbrokers I simply gave up the idea of owning one. I printed out my stories by hand and sent them out that way. I hand-printed them with a pen. I got to be a very fast hand-printer. It got so that I could hand-print faster than I could write. I wrote three or four short stories a week. I kept things in the mail. I imagined the editors of
The Atlantic Monthly
and
Harper's
saying: “Hey, here's another one of those things by that nut …”

One night I took Gertrude to a bar. We sat at a table to one side and drank beer. It was snowing outside. I felt a little better than usual. We drank and talked. An hour or so passed. I began gazing into Gertrude's eyes and she looked right back. “A
good man, nowadays, is hard to find!
” said the juke box. Gertrude moved her body to the music, moved her head to the music, and looked into my eyes.

“You have a very strange face,” she said. “You're not really ugly.”

“Number four shipping clerk, working his way up.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“Love is for real people.”

“You sound real.”

“I dislike real people.”

“You dislike them?”

“I hate them.”

We drank some more, not saying much. It continued to snow. Gertrude turned her head and stared into the crowd of people. Then she looked at me.

“Isn't he
handsome?
”

“Who?”

“That soldier over there. He's sitting alone. He sits so
straight
. And he's got all his medals on.”

“Come on, let's get out of here.”

“But it's not late.”

“You can stay.”

“No, I want to go with
you.
”

“I don't care what you do.”

“Is it the soldier? Are you mad because of the soldier?”

my bed. “We heard you in the bathroom. Are you sick?”

“Yes. But it's nothing serious, I'm sure. An open window.”

“Mrs. Downing, the landlady, is making you some soup.”

“No, it's all right.”

“It'll do you good.”

Gertrude moved nearer my bed. Hilda remained where she was, pink and scrubbed and blushing. Gertrude pivoted back and forth on her very high heels. “Are you new in town?”

“Yes.”

“You're not in the army?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“No work?”

“No work.”

“Yes,” said Gertrude to Hilda, “look at his hands. He has the most beautiful hands. You can see that he has never worked.”

The landlady, Mrs. Downing, knocked. She was large and pleasant. I imagined that her husband was dead and that she was religious. She carried a large bowl of beef broth, holding it high in the air. I could see the steam rising. I took the bowl. We exchanged pleasantries. Yes, her husband was dead. She was very religious. There were crackers, plus salt and pepper.

“Thank you.”

Mrs. Downing looked at both of the girls. “We'll all be going now. We hope you get well soon. And I hope the girls haven't bothered you too much?”

“Oh no!” I grinned into the broth. She liked that.

“Come on, girls.”

Mrs. Downing left the door open. Hilda managed one last blush, gave me the tiniest smile, then left. Gertrude remained. She watched me spoon the broth in. “Is it good?”

“I want to thank all you people. All this … is very unusual.”

“I'm going.” She turned and walked very slowly toward the door. Her buttocks moved under her tight black skirt; her legs were golden. At the doorway she stopped and turned, rested her dark eyes on me once again, held me. I was transfixed, glowing. The moment she felt my response she tossed her head and laughed. She had a lovely neck, and all

“Oh, shit!”

“It was the soldier!”

“I'm going.”

I stood up at the table, left a tip and walked toward the door. I heard Gertrude behind me. I walked down the street in the snow. Soon she was walking at my side.

“You didn't even get a taxi. These high heels in the snow!”

I didn't answer. We walked the four or five blocks to the rooming-house. I went up the steps with her beside me. Then I walked down to my room, opened the door, closed it, got out of my clothes and went to bed. I heard her throw something against the wall of her room.

Rows and rows of silent bicycles. Bins filled with bicycle parts. Rows and rows of bicycles hanging from the ceiling: green bikes, red bikes, yellow bikes, purple bikes, blue bikes, girls' bikes, boys' bikes, all hanging up there; the glistening spokes, the wheels, the rubber tires, the paint, the leather seats, taillights, headlights, handbrakes; hundreds of bicycles, row after row.

We got an hour for lunch. I'd eat quickly, having been up most of the night and early morning, I'd be tired, aching all over, and I found this secluded spot under the bicycles. I'd crawl down there, under three deep tiers of bicycles immaculately arranged. I'd lay there on my back, and suspended over me, precisely lined up, hung rows of gleaming silver spokes, wheel rims, black rubber tires, shiny new paint, everything in perfect order. It was grand, correct, orderly—500 or 600 bicycles stretching out over me, covering me, all in place. Somehow it was meaningful. I'd look up at them and know I had forty-five minutes of rest under the bicycle tree.

Yet I also knew with another part of me, that if I ever let go and dropped into the flow of those shiny new bicycles, I was done, finished, that I'd never be able to make it. So I just lay back and let the wheels and the spokes and the colors soothe me.

A man with a hangover should never lay flat on his back looking up at the roof of a warehouse. The wooden girders finally get to you; and the skylights—you can see the chicken wire in the glass skylights—that wire somehow reminds a man of jail. Then there's the heaviness of the eyes, the longing for just one drink, and then the sound of people moving about, you hear them, you know your hour is up, somehow you have to get on your feet and walk around and fill and pack orders …

She was the manager's secretary. Her name was Carmen—but despite the Spanish name she was a blonde and she wore tight knitted dresses, high spiked heels, nylons, garter belt, her mouth was thick with lipstick, but, oh, she could shimmy, she could shake, she wobbled while bringing the orders up to the desk, she wobbled back to the office, all the boys watching every move, every twitch of her buttocks; wobbling, wiggling, wagging. I am not a lady's man. I never have been. To be a lady's man you have to make with the sweet talk. I've never been good at sweet talk. But, finally, with Carmen pressing me, I led her into one of the boxcars we were unloading at the rear of the warehouse and I took her standing up in the back of one of those boxcars. It was good, it was warm; I thought of blue sky and wide clean beaches, yet it was sad—there was definitely a lack of human feeling that I couldn't understand or deal with. I had that knit dress up around her hips and I stood there pumping it to her, finally pressing my mouth to her heavy mouth thick with scarlet lipstick and I came between two unopened cartons with the air full of cinders and with her back pressed against the filthy splintering boxcar wall in the merciful dark.

—
F
ACTOTUM

swans die in the Spring too

and there it floated

dead on a Sunday

sideways

circling in current

and I walked to the rotunda

and overhead

gods in chariots

dogs, women

circled,

and death

ran down my throat

like a mouse,

and I heard the people coming

with their picnic bags

and laughter,

and I felt guilty