The Fires of Spring (20 page)

It was now late August, and David sat idly in his booth watching the moron’s great sweating arms muscle the gondolas about. The heat was intense and the Sheik seemed like an animal, panting at his work. Then suddenly the massive form stopped and stared past David. The Sheik’s dull eyes brightened, and he began to lick his lips. In surprise David looked in the direction of the moron’s stare and saw that Nora, in a new dress, was standing by the booth.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, Nora,” he replied.

“It’s hot today, isn’t it?” she asked.

“The Park doesn’t like girls to hang around cashiers,” David said.

“The Park knows me,” Nora replied. “Now if you don’t want me to hang around …”

“Don’t go!” David blurted. There was a long silence.

“I haven’t seen you much this year,” Nora finally said. “How do you like my new dress?”

“It’s very pretty,” David said. His relief came and David left the box. “How’d you like to ride the Hurricane?” he asked.

“Say, I’d like that!” Nora said. “It scares me, but I like it.” When they approached the ride, David avoided the main booth and slipped into the second-fare platform. As they rode up the steep incline Nora huddled close to David and said, “I get it. Mr. Stone don’t want you to be seen with me.” David did not reply and suddenly their car shot into its wild decline. Nora clung to him and cried, “God, this is worse than before,” yet even more than before she thrilled to the violence of the Hurricane.

After the ride David asked, “Why do you like it so much if you’re so afraid?” and the thin girl looked at him and said, “A short life and a merry!”

“What do you mean, short life?” He was annoyed at this sentiment and led the excited girl to a bench by the lake. He was looking at her and speaking to her as if she were a man.

“Nobody lives forever,” Nora said. Her good teeth and still-clear eyes belied this, and David laughed.

“You talk like a ghost,” he said.

“Sometimes I feel like one,” she said. “This sun feels good, don’t it? Mostly I’m cold.”

“How did you like Florida?” David asked, still talking with her on a man-to-man basis.

The thin girl, who grew prettier as she grew older, laughed merrily. “What a trip!” she said. “His wife went along. She said a man deserved one last fling when he was past fifty. Well, I gave him a good one. One day his wife saw me in a bathing suit and said, ‘You’re skinny!’ Her! She must of weighed a ton. Her husband laughed at her and said, right to her face, ‘My wife is the best woman on this earth, and one of the biggest.’ We had a fine time, I can tell you.”

And as she talked she became a woman. Later on David could remember exactly when this occurred. She was telling about Florida, laughing at the man’s jovial wife, when she moved her position and her dress caught above her left knee. David saw that this knee was rounded. It bore no protruding bones as his did, and it looked quite unlike the knees of basketball players when they scrimmaged. The dress fluttered and the knee was gone, but David wanted Nora very much.

She sensed this, perhaps from his breathing, and said, “Remember what we said on closing night last year? Summer’s almost gone, David.”

Wildly he told his secret. “I followed you to the Coal Mine
one night, Nora. I wanted to talk with you and even make love with you. But I looked through a crack and you had a man. And the new girl wasn’t wearing anything …”

“You were afraid,” Nora said softly.

“Yes! And I swore I’d never go there again. And I never shall.”

Nora drew back and looked at the young cashier. He was freckled and snub-nosed, throbbing with fire and vast dreams; and in her own lung there was a persistent cough. Not even Florida had warmed that away. “David,” she said quietly. “When you looked at the new girl undressed and saw her breasts …” she paused. “I’m twice that pretty,” she said.

“I swore I’d never go back there,” David repeated, burning to touch this frail girl.

“We don’t have to go there,” she said quietly. He swallowed very hard and nervously cried out to a passing man.

“What’s the time, mister?”

“It’s six-twenty,” the man said.

“Gee, thanks! Time to go!” He rose and hurried back to Venice. Nora trailed a few steps behind him, so he waited for her, and then she walked with tiny steps, smiling at him, and beneath her new dress he could sense her knees. “Maybe we’ll find a place,” he muttered huskily.

And that very night the Sheik came to thank David for being a friend. “You the bes’ frien’ I ever got,” the lowering hulk blubbered. His eyes were not close-set like those of idiots but wide and expressive. “Because you my frien’ I like to show you somethin’.” He insisted that David follow him along the canal paths and into the caverns of Venice. There he showed David the interior of the palace from which the mechanical princess threw kisses. It was a small room walled in by canvas. A single light showed so as to reflect upon the clicking princess. Outside the canal ran, and even as David stood in the strange palace he could hear a gondola drift by with boys making jokes about the princess. Voices echoed along the canal and then deep silence followed until the next gondola drifted by.

“You can peek,” the Sheik said, ducking low behind the princess and peering into the darkness. A gondola passed with a single couple. Thinking themselves alone, they embraced passionately and David looked away. “Mos’ nights I s’eep here,” the ape-man drooled. “But if you …”

“I don’t want it,” David snapped. “What made you think …”

“I saw ’at priiy gi’l,” the moron said. He looked right at David and his lips were slightly parted. “If you an’ ’at gi’l …”

“Let me out of here!” David cried. That night he made change very fast, his arms tight to his sides and his full attention on the sliding coins. At midnight he checked in his accounts and hurried directly to the trolley. He breathed easily when he felt the clanging wheels turn on their noisy way to the poorhouse. Safe behind Door 8 he thought of Nora. “She said she was prettier than the other girl,” he mused, thinking of the delicate curves of the first breasts he had seen. “How could she be?” Then the flashing memory of Max Volo’s post card hung above his bed. Now he did not deceive himself. He said, “I want to be with her. Tomorrow I’ll see her and we’ll arrange it.” With that admission he forced himself to go to sleep.

But in the morning he said, “I won’t go to the Park today! Mr. Stone was right. Why, Nora …” Reassuring himself that he did not want to see the girl, he fooled around the poorhouse until the last possible trolley had gone. “Well,” he breathed easily, “that’s that!” Then he dashed down to the highway and flagged a truck which took him to Paradise.

The head cashier said, “You were eight dollars over last night.” The other cashiers laughed and the head continued, “What were you dreaming about?”

At work David avoided the Sheik. When the hulking man came to his booth David ordered him back to work. Then, although the day was still cool, he began to perspire. He wiped his face and muttered, “I know just what’ll happen! Mr. Stone’ll come along and say, ‘How about dinner with Capt. Sousa?’ and we’ll have a fine time!” He chuckled and felt good, reasoning, “I’ll talk with Sousa and tell him what to play! Won’t that be something!” But his pleasure was short lived, for he stopped daydreaming and saw a man who looked like the Baptist minister when he preached at the poorhouse: “Sin is upon you, and only the blood of the Lord can wash it away, not the waters of the Neshaminy nor of the Mississippi nor even of Jordan. For sin is upon you!”

He felt sick, for now he knew what sin was. In the poorhouse it had been stealing cheese, and Toothless Tom had always done that, but he had helped eat it. That was sinful. But now sin was Nora and the Sheik’s room, and he knew that was really sinful. “I feel awful!” he said to the assistant
manager. “I’m going home.” He hurried from the booth and ran toward the main office, but as he did so, he heard a voice calling to him.

“Where’s the fire, Dave?” Nora cried. He stopped and looked toward the rootbeer stand. In a simple gingham dress, peasant style, buttoning in back and drawn tight against her bosom, the thin girl stood with a glass of loganberry in her hand. “Taste it!” she said. “It’s cool.” Her hair cascaded down in the sunlight.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” David said, sipping her drink, and the fizzing water tasted brackish, for he knew that his resolves—and the pleading voice of the Baptist minister—were lost. He added, “When I was in bed, I could see you in my room.”

“I would like to be in bed with you,” she said simply. And then she slipped her arm through his, and they walked back to the Canals of Venice.

The assistant manager saw them and joked, “You feelin’ a lot better, I see.”

“Were you sick?” Nora asked, her breath catching.

“I didn’t feel so good,” David explained, and then she understood. She gripped his arm and whispered. “It’s all right to be afraid, the first time. Everybody is! You should be a girl! I can tell you! But you’ll remember today as long …” She jumped back and cried, “God Almighty! What’s that thing?”

David was glad of a chance to laugh. “That’s the Sheik,” he said.

“What a monster!” Nora cried.

“He’s lending us his place,” David explained. As if the monstrous thing had touched her, Nora shivered.

“It’s all right?” she asked, and that afternoon, during his relief, David led her into the Venetian castle. The room had nothing but a wooden bed with a rope spring and a single unshaded bulb that lighted the princess. “Can we turn that out?” Nora asked.

“No,” David said. “That’s part of the scenery.” Nora clasped her arms across her waist.

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind,” she said.

“I’m sorry it’s such a place,” David said, kissing her awkwardly and fumbling at her tight buttons.

Nora sat upon the bed and smiled up at her agitated lover. “Dave,” she said softly, “when you love a girl be very gentle. Take it easy. Say nice things and don’t rush. Don’t
be like those lunks at Max Volo’s.” She indicated that he was to sit by her and when he had done so she ran her fingers through his hair. “It’s criminal,” she said, “that men have to lose their hair.”

David continued to work upon the tight buttons and Nora teased him again. Then quickly she exhausted her lungs and the buttons slipped easily through the cloth. “Why couldn’t you sleep last night?” she whispered.

Her dress had now worked loose and the silver cascade of her body tumbled forth. David stared for a moment at the miracle he had accomplished and then buried his lips against her bosom. She clasped his head and after a long moment asked again why he had not slept. “Because you haunted me,” he said, “and because I was saying a poem over and over to myself.”

“A poem?” Nora asked nervously.

“Yes!” he replied, and for a moment the urgency left him. “That first night you joined our party I wrote a poem. I didn’t think then that you were mixed up in it. It was all about dog-tooth violets …”

“What are they?” Nora asked.

“Haven’t you ever seen one?” he asked, and quickly he told her of the imperial flower of spring and of how from his earliest days …

“What was the poem?” she asked.

He recited the verses:
“By the dark moss a dog-tooth violet …”
and as he said the words he realized that this poem like all poems was dedicated to his love, not his mystic love of the vast world, but his slim, pretty, warm Nora. “I was thinking of you when I wrote it,” he said, and his hands went to her soft, rounded knees.

The effect of this poem upon Nora was even greater than upon David. She had not learned in school that men have traditionally, when young and foolish or when old and very wise, dedicated their finest thoughts to the full love of some woman, so she was unprepared for the idea; but even without instruction she sensed that it was sweet and proper for David to have thought of her. “Imagine!” she whimpered. “Before, I never even got so much as a letter. Not from no one.” She buried her head upon his shoulder and rested thus while David pulled away her clothes. Then she pressed his face to hers and kissed him a hundred times. “I knew this was right,” she whispered. “You got nothing to fear, Dave. You’ll never forget this night. I’ll make your old poem look sick.”

On the other side of the canvas wall soft waters of the canal kept drifting past in metal troughs. In the darkness the Sheik stood guard, sacrificing his evening hour to the young lovers. In drifting gondolas boys and girls and pregnant women and old men swept by. They stared at the mechanical Venetian princess, and the Sheik, who peered at them with one eye through a slit he had made years ago in the palace wall, sneered at the travelers, wondering what they would think if they could see the real princess behind the canvas: for he could see her! He had cut a peephole into the room, and he swore in his dumb way that no girl had ever been so beautiful.

Like a summer storm exploding through long prepared grasslands, David’s desire for Nora rapidly exceeded the bounds of both reason and propriety. At first he fooled himself with resolutions like: “Well, that’s that! Never again, Mr. Stone was right.” Then he tried the usual manly chatter: “Well, there’s got to be a first time for everything. A guy’s got to grow up. If you never try, you’ll never know.” But there was always a residue of experience not covered by any phrases. Nora was a powerful girl, adept in the ways of love and hovering upon the brink of intensity. She had a rare gift of sharing, and she wrapped David very closely to her, as much by the tentacles of her mind as by her hungry arms and legs.

On three successive afternoons David led her to the Venetian palace, and they were days of explosive sharing. The Sheik, unknown to the lovers, stood guard and panted heavily as he watched Nora. He was prepared, therefore, when David approached him and said, “If I pay your room rent, will you sleep in town?”

“I be glad to,” the giant replied.

David told Nora, “I don’t want you ever to go back to the Coal Mine,” he said.

“I can’t live here,” she said simply.

“Why can’t you get a room somewhere?” David insisted.

“With what?” she asked, holding up her empty hands.