Three Short Novels (37 page)

“You know that machine they got that chews up the old records, old stuff they don't want around anymore? Hell, take the whole damn Fidelity building, take the lunchtime movies, take the roof garden, take the girls and the boys, take 'em all, the long and the short and
the tall, take their Fidelity Frolics, run 'em through the masticator, maserator, what's it called?”

“Don't let the efficiency man get away! Anybody who'd train himself for a job like that is queer as an undertaker, queer as a queer,” said the intruder.

Cort leaned his chair far back. Once he'd gone over in the shaky metal chair, and, afraid it might embarrass him again, he held to the table's edge with his fingertips. “They had their eyes on me,” he said. “Snyder says to me, ‘You happy here, Costigan?' I thought he was kidding. I thought, ‘You tell
me,
boy. You want me to go around kissing ass?' ”

“You're not a smiler.”

“But that doesn't mean I was unhappy, man!”

“You never looked unhappier than anybody else. Snyder—he look happy to you?”

“Snyder's the saddest sack this side of . . . ” The spindly legs of the chair were slipping away and he gripped the table. “Hell, I'm glad I'm through with the bastards. I think I'll go back to selling refrigerators. Get to walk around. I always felt like a fairy, sitting at a desk. My calf muscles are down to nothing. Lost my elasticity. I'm like an old rubber band—can't snap anymore.” He heard a child's footsteps in the living room, and waited. His younger son appeared in the doorway, red shorts wet, face impassive. “You want some little thing?”

Pauline came up behind the boy. “He can have milk and a cracker. It's too close to dinner.” Because her words were an inescapable hint to the intruder, she kept her eyes down as she crossed to the refrigerator.

“I guess I'll be going,” said the intruder.

“Finish your beer! Finish your beer!” Cort commanded. “We got a long ways to go before dinner. She says that so he doesn't spoil his appetite.” He could ask the intruder to stay for dinner. He could do that in spite of his wife. But, pouring more beer, he admitted that he was eager to be rid of him. The man was a reminder of the company,
and only after the fellow was gone would the severing be complete. They knew each other too well. At their desks they'd assumed their position of indebtedness, they'd joined in the exhibitive laughter, they'd kept their boredom from their eyes as if it were a crime, something stolen from the company, and now, worst of all, they were hilarious outcasts together. “What am I going to do with all this beer, man? You've got to help me get rid of it.”

The child climbed onto a chair and watched the milk pouring into the glass, his fingers laid out flat on the table.

“How old are you?” the intruder asked. “Twenty-one?”

“You think we got a midget here?” Cort went off into his high laugh again.

“You a midget?”

The boy still gazed, forgetting his milk.

“Something funny about my face?” the intruder asked, covering it with his hands and staring back at the boy from between his fingers.

“You've got Fidelity branded on your forehead, man,” Cort said. “You got it there as long as you live.” He pointed to his own forehead. “See mine? Every place I ever worked got their name branded on me. That's the only way people got of knowing who you are, they read all those company names on you. The more names you got, the less they can trust you. Snyder's got only one name on his—Fidelity.”

“Mighty Mouse Snyder,” said the intruder.

They gagged on their laughs. The intruder controlled himself sooner than Cort because Cort's wife, unsmiling, was standing by the boy's chair, a long-legged woman in shorts with a pregnant belly, a composite condition that embarrassed the man unmercifully.

“Sit down and have a beer,” Cort said to his wife.

She sat between him and the boy, her chin in her hand. Her sun-bleached hair hung in strings to her shoulders—she hadn't curled it for a long time—and her face was blotchy. Her throat was a little thick with the fat that always came with her pregnancies, but no fat
ever came to fill out the hollow cheeks, and her eyes appeared lashless because the lashes were as light as her hair. Cort suspected her of retaliating against him by looking that way. He suspected that the only way she could retaliate against the company for firing him while she was pregnant with their third child, and retaliate against the pregnancy that went on for so long, was to retaliate against him, her husband, closest, handiest, and more imperiled than she had ever expected any man to be. He kneaded her shoulder affectionately, telling her, in that way, that she was the woman for him, and that it was her love for him, not her grimness, that was getting through to him.

The intruder was thrown into a state of confusion by this kneading. Cort's hand on his wife's bare shoulder insinuated their intimacy and its result. He shifted in his chair, crossing and recrossing his legs.

“Do you have another job lined up?” she asked him, her voice softer than her face.

“My wife's brother,” he said. “My wife's brother's in auto supply, he's going to put me on the floor, selling.”

“Your legs won't hold you up,” Cort said. “They been bent too long.”

The intruder gripped his thigh, massaging it involuntarily in the same way Cort massaged his wife's shoulder. “If I can find something else, I'll take that instead. For the reason that I hate my wife's brother. He's got a knack for making me feel like . . .” For the obscene word in his mouth he substituted “a nobody. You ever meet anybody who made you feel like a nobody? You ought to meet him.”

“That's just the kind of guy I shouldn't meet,” Cort said.

The obnoxious brother-in-law became an enemy in common. They swallowed down more beer, knocked off the ashes of their cigarettes, while the intruder kept shaking his head over his relative, cursing in his cheek as if his anger were a fingernail he'd bitten off and wanted out of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Cort said, clicking his index finger against his beer glass,
“the world's full of bastards. It's a bastard world. Everybody wanting his, spitting in your eye, crossing off your name. If you don't like that stuff, if you don't like it, you might as well do yourself in because you're going to get done in anyway.” In the midst of his tirade he heard the click of his nail repeated by his son on his own glass.

“You can say that again,” the intruder said.

Cort saw his wife take down the child's hand to stop the tapping and hold it firmly under the table. The boy began to squirm and cry.

“That's what my brother did,” he went on. “He said to hell with it.”

Pauline lost to the boy's struggles and released his hand. The tapping on the glass began again, the child staring at the visitor, seeking praise of his talent.

“The man had a heart,” Cort said, his voice rising. “You're not supposed to have a heart, you're supposed to be ashamed of it, you're supposed to hide it or get rid of it, do something. But he couldn't help it, he had a heart.” He narrowed his eyes, probing the visitor's eyes. “You around then?”

“When was it?”

“Six years ago,” he said. “Come October.”

“No,” said the intruder. “I was in L.A. We came up here a year ago. My wife wanted to be near her sister. Then I got this job with Fidelity.” He was giving details of his own existence to forestall details from Cort, and Cort, realizing how close to breaking he looked, dropped his gaze but let his story run on.

“He was what you'd call a complete man. You know what I mean? I mean he had everything. He was on his way up because he had a mind, he was smart. God, that man could persuade. But he had a heart, too. That was his trouble. He couldn't stand the dog eat dog. That's the only thing to do if you got a heart, man. Bow out. So he bowed out just before the curtain went up. He was running for Congress, see?”

The child continued to tap the glass, smiling.

“It's no place for a man with a heart,” said the intruder solemnly, pushing the ashtray around with his knuckles.

Pauline took the boy's hands again and held them in a hard clamp, and the boy wailed and thrashed around in his chair.

“He's doing all right, leave him alone!” Cort told her, his voice high and breaking.

“That isn't the reason,” she said.

“Then why're you holding his hands?”

“I'm talking about your brother. That isn't the reason.” A corner of her mouth jerked down.

“You never even knew him!”

“People with hearts, they don't kill themselves. I know people with hearts. I can name you some.”

“Name me some!” he shouted. “Name me some!”

The intruder laughed, embarrassed, responding to his host's challenge as to a joke.

“He was weak,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus, it takes a hell of a lot of courage to do what he did.”

“He was weak.”

Cort put his fists to his temples. “What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you know what goes on in a man?”

The child was crying under the table. He felt the soft body when he moved his feet.

“What I know is you talk too much about messes.”

“That's what they are. You going to deny it?”

“No, I don't deny that,” she cried. “All I'm saying is you don't have to kill yourself to show you don't want any part of it. All I'm saying is there's lots of people with hearts. They stay alive as long as they can.”

He struck the table. “Don't tell me about your people with hearts. Anybody I'll name, it'll be somebody you don't like. You take my sister Naomi. You don't like her. There's somebody with a heart and you don't like her. You say she's a sap, she's a clown.”

The boy was climbing up from the floor and she was trying to help him. Then, realizing that she was drawing him onto her lap when she did not want him there, she unclasped his hands from her clothes and held him away.

“Every time you get a friend in here,” she was saying, “every time we go anywhere, you've got to bring up about your brother. You make death sound like something to brag about. You talk like death is all there is to life.”

“He was my brother!” he shouted, stumbling up from his chair. She had never criticized him before about his brother, she had never complained. Why had she chosen the worst possible time, now in the presence of this loser, who would go on his way convinced that Cort Costigan was the real loser, a man with a monstrous habit, an attachment to a dead man.

The loser stumbled up with him. “I got to be going.”

Cort walked him to the door, shook hands, said, “See you around,” and closed the door. On his way back to his wife at the table he stopped in the kitchen doorway, his fists straining dangerously down at his sides. This anger, trapping him there, seemed not to be against his wife. Who, then? Who, then? But something was terribly wrong if this anger was against his brother. Unmercifully wrong. He made his way to the table, sat down by his wife, took her hand in both his hands, and lay his head down on the knot their hands made together.

11

S
eagulls were flapping along after the ferry, hovering high and low on the wind. “Bigger than most birds, aren't they?” Naomi remarked to the waitress who was sliding the coffee toward her. “Oh, but ostriches, too! I forgot!” and laughed. “
They're
really big!” She gazed out the ferry windows again, her legs crossed, her high heel caught on the rung of the stool. They might not be as big as some, but they're bigger than the sparrows back home. Cold-eyed birds! What else could you expect, with cold, sea-salty crud in their gizzards, fishheads and guts and wet crusts of bread? She was smiling humoringly at them in case anybody was watching her. The whole city was cold, a gray puzzle beyond the windows, beyond the dipping, flapping, mean-eyed birds. The fish-gray water was cold and God knew how deep under this rumbling tub of a ferryboat. “Oh, they're strong birds all right. My, they got strong wings!” trilling her flattery, ducking her head to drink her coffee.

“You sure don't realize how big the world is, do you? No, you sure don't,” she answered herself, and asked for a bearclaw to eat with her coffee. The more she purchased, the more the waitress might like her. She cut the pastry into four strips, picked up one daintily,
and, with the avid, happy eyes of the enchanted visitor, watched the smoke-brown buildings slide by. The hotel room where she'd slept last night—all night long a bad smell kept waking her. Was it a mouse rotting? Or was it only her own fear of a strange city? “Can't make out which hotel is mine!” She laughed, half expecting the waitress to turn her head and help her find it.
You're over forty yourself
, she said to the waitress.
Is that why you can't smile? But you're in your own city, behind your own little counter on your own chuggling ferry, you chuggle along in the same watery groove every day. You're not far from home. You didn't spend last night in a dead-mouse hotel room.
Was it done in this city, too, like that woman had done a year ago back home, checking into a hotel and the next day found on the bed, dead from an overdose of sleeping pills? What the hell you trying to do? she asked herself. Stir up this woman's sympathy with a threat of what you'll do to yourself if she doesn't smile at you? She can't read your mind, she can't even read your face.