Thrill Kids (10 page)

B
EHIND HIS HORN-RIMMED GLASSES
, Leemie’s eyes were sympathetic that Saturday morning, and he said, “You got a right to be a blue boy every now and then, man. You got that right.”

“I’m cutting out,” Flip Heine told him. “And I’m going to cut out wide. Out of this stinking city! Away from this place!”

He was sitting on the edge of the iron bed in Leemie’s room, the cap pulled down on his head. His eyes were bloodshot from crying, and the handkerchief Leemie had lent him was balled up in his hand.

“Where you gonna go, man?”

“I’m never going back.”

“You had it!”

“Jesus, Leem, did your old man ever pull anything like this on
you?”

“He raised me right,” Leemie said.
“I
goofed. I didn’t go for the readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic routine. You know? Like, I didn’t dig the stuff. I had eyes for the numbers outside books.”

Flip wadded the handkerchief into his pocket. “My old man thinks the place is all I got to know about, all I got to think about. I’d just as soon gone to college. You know? Yale. Class!”

“Mine raised me right,” Leemie repeated.

“Be a lawyer or something big deal. Friend of mine’s going to be a lawyer. My old man thinks Yale’s the name of a lock.”

“He had you under lock and key, didn’t he, man?” “No more,” Flip said, pulling the cap down farther toward his ears. “I checked out for final this time.”

Leemie walked over to the old maple bureau and pulled out a drawer. He fumbled for an envelope and a small square package of tissue. “Yeah,” he said, “but the break ain’t all that easy to make. You got to have moola, man! Everything costs.”

“Why couldn’t I work for you, Leem? Till I got enough?”

“No dice,” Leemie said. He sat down in the rocker near the window and began to roll some of the ground-up weed he took from the envelope into the tissue. “Runaway kid around, I’d get hung, man. A few days you can stay, O.K., but I can’t use a permanent roommate.”

“Who’d know, Leem?”

“Some wise dick. No dice.” Leemie brought the tissue to his mouth, licked an end, and rolled it up tight to make a cigarette.

“You smoking tea?” Flip asked him.

“Yeah. A little pot now and then picks up the pieces.”

“I never had any of the stuff. Once in school they give us this big lecture, see, all about how it makes you squirrely.”

“Makes squirrels out squirrels,” Leemie said. He struck a match and lit up, sucking the smoke into his nostrils and sniffing it up into his head.

“What’s it make you feel like, anyhow?”

“No way. That’s the kick.”

“You just sail, huh, Leem?”

“Man, you don’t go no place. You stay.”

“Can I have a drag?”

“No dice. It costs. Can’t hardly make a strike these days with all the Fridays out smellin’ the air.” “What’s it cost?” Flip asked. “A packet like this? Four fin.” “Man!”

“A buck a stick, rolled.”

Leemie sat there sniffing the smoke up his nose, while Flip Heine began walking back and forth across the room with his hands jammed into the pockets of his best trousers. On the floor under the bed there was a duffel bag he had filled that morning. In it were four shirts; another pair of pants; two pairs of undershorts, one dirty, one clean; socks, a toothbrush, a half-dozen comic books, and his Social Security card. He had stolen out of his family’s apartment early that morning, between four and five, after he had finished work at the place and everyone was in bed asleep. Until dawn he rode the Lexington Avenue subway, up to the end and back down and up again. Then he’d bought a cup of coffee and a bagel and headed for Leemie’s. It was the only place he could think to go where he wouldn’t be ashamed.

Flip was afraid, but he didn’t tell Leemie that. He told him everything that had happened all week; why his father had done it to him; and what his mother had whispered to him afterward in her slow German, her hand on his brow as he lay forlorn on his bed.

Flip had thought about that a lot:

It hadn’t offered him much consolation at the time, and as he recalled it now, it made him more afraid; and it was this he could not discuss with Leemie. It was knowing he had run away to nothing; no one; just run away, and here he was. Where? And what would he do now?

He had not really wanted to stay and work for Leemie. Leemie was too different, too weird. But when Leemie had said “No dice” to his suggestion, it had been like the closing of a final door. Manny and Johnny and Bardo couldn’t help him; he wasn’t even going to tell them about it. How could he? Their folks weren’t like that. Manny hadn’t even caught hell for flunking his subjects. Flip would have been black and blue for that alone. Johnny’s father wanted him to go to college, and Bardo called his mother by her first name. Even a creep like Leemie saw the fact that Flip must have some lousy family to do a thing like that to a guy.

“You mean just ‘cause you didn’t get a haircut?” Leemie’d said, amazed.

And Flip had broken down and bawled like a fruit.

Leemie’d said, “It’ll grow back, man.” He’d slapped Flip across the shoulder. “You ain’t permanently bald or nothin’ like that, man. ‘Sides, can’t hardly tell the difference with the cap on.”

“Shaving a man’s goddamn head this way,” Flip had cried. “Jesus!”

The harsh and pungent smell of the marijuana that Leemie was smoking made Flip feel kind of sick. He saw the pictures stuck in Leemie’s mirror, and the books he had stacked in dusty corners around the small room, and the dirty sink with the rusty fixtures, and the soap scum stuck around the bowl. He wondered vaguely what his mother and father and his brothers and sisters would be saying now about him being gone; and he thought of the way his mother scrubbed every floor in the flat every day, on her hands and knees.

“Man,” Leemie said, “don’t look like that phone’s going to ring.”

“It’ll ring,” Flip said, “or I’ll try the number again later.”

“You act kind of rifty. You all right?” “What do you think?” Flip said.

It would be dark, and maybe they wouldn’t be able to tell with his cap on. He’d chance it anyway. He couldn’t just stay cooped up at Leemie’s day and night. Besides, that was the only thing he knew he wanted to do now: cruise around with the three of them the way they’d done last week. Someday, he bet, Bardo Raleigh would be a big man and his name would be in all the papers. A general even, maybe. Him a general, Johnny a lawyer, and Manny the head of the S.P.C.A. or something. Christ!

He said, “Even if I went back, it wouldn’t be any good. I’d catch more hell.”

Leemie blew smoke through his nose. “You still owe me for the knife,” he said, “but I ain’t gonna kick your teeth in when you’re down.”

“All of a sudden everything’s so goddamn crazy,” Flip mused. He socked the air with his fist.

“It’ll grow back,” Leemie said.

• • •

Peter Heine rapped the dottle from his pipe hard against the old black stove. Behind him in the kitchen his wife spread the plates out on the table.

“No,” he said, “we don’t tell anyone.”

“He packed a
Patentkoffer,
Peter.”

“He’ll come back. Why should we announce we have such a son? Announce to the world we cannot control him. How do we look then?”

“It was his hair, Peter. I think he was ashamed.” “So he would go to show the world? No! Defiance he goes to show the world!”

“He had no money,” the old woman said. “Where can he go?”

“To his store, maybe. To his dirty store!”

Peter Heine kicked a chair out from the table and sank down on it. He tucked a white napkin into his shirt collar and reached for a piece of dark bread.

“We could send Karl to look,” his wife said.

“Karl has his work! Is the place to close down because we have an ingrate for a son?”

“I could go.”

“Where is the store? Who knows that?
Ja!
His store is a secret even from his family!”

“I could look in the stores along the street,” the old woman said. She padded to the stove on slippered feet, reached for a ladle, and stirred soup in the huge tin pot. “I could look in all of them,” she said, “and maybe find him.”

“And find the devil’s tongue to gossip, maybe too you would!”

“Ja!
The devil has a long tongue.”

“He’ll come home, he will, and I’ll break his
legs
this time, and we’ll see how far he runs!”

“No more fighting, Peter. You must promise.”

“I must promise I want my son a fool? I must promise I want him out in the streets getting into trouble? No! He
has
to
learn!”

“Young hearts listen little and learn slow,” Hans Heine’s mother mused.

His father said, “The whip will teach what words will not!”

• • •

But here we are in any case, Flip thought. It was hot and the stale air was close. Leemie slept in a pair of ragged jockey shorts on the bed, his skinny body rising and falling with his heavy breathing, a book called
The Duchess Instructs Her Ladies in the Art of Love
fallen to the floor, worn pages spilling from between its crude yellow paper covers.

Flip peeled an orange and sucked the juice out of it, looked at the clock and saw it was past noon, and wondered why he cared what time it was. His mother used to have an expression, “Watched pots never boil.” Maybe she had already called the police and they were out looking for him. Maybe they’d nab him when he left Leemie’s and make him go back home. Aw, it wouldn’t do any good even if they did. His old man would probably kill him this time.

Walking over to the window, Flip rubbed the smudge from a narrow pane and looked out on the hot street. A fire hydrant was uncapped, and kids were dancing in and out of the flow of water, squealing and laughing and having a good time. The water gushed down the sewers, carrying bits of paper and odd pieces of garbage with it. A moth-eaten mongrel stood barking excitedly on the curb. Three girls were gaily skipping rope. Flip heard them chanting in their singsong, steady tone:

Flip turned his back on the window. He stood in the room looking at Leemie, and the dirty book that had dropped to the floor, and sticking out from under the bed the duffel bag with his things in it. Then in the immense complexity of home-longing he thought of his father without rancor, and his eyes filled with stinging tears, and he wanted to know how he could go home again. How could he do it? Just walk in?

The phone cut across his consciousness. Leemie groaned and rolled over.

“Bardo Robert Raleigh here,” the voice said. “Did you call me?”

“It’s me. Flip.”

“Ah, Heine! I tried to reach you earlier.”

“I’m not home,” Flip said. “D’you call my home?”

“Yes, mister, I did. I wanted to check on tonight.”

“What’d they say?”

“That you were out, of course.”

“That all they said?”

“That was the extent of our conversation, mister. They said you were out and I could call back again.”

“Oh. Yeah, like, they didn’t sound worried, huh?”

“Infinitely calm, mister. Now about tonight? You’ll be joining us, of course?”

“Crazy!” Flip said dully.

“Then listen!” Bardo commanded. In the background Leemie snarled at him to get the hell off the phone while Bardo’s voice sang:

“Shake it, Hairy Hans,” Leemie insisted again angrily. “This ain’t tea time.”

At the word “tea,” Flip’s eyes fell to the chair and the half-full packet of marijuana on it. He remembered what Leemie had said. A packet like that cost four fin.

“How’d you like the song, mister?”

“It was crazy, man.” Where did a guy sell the stuff, though?

“C’mon, Hairy-head, shake that phone!”

“I’ve got to cut out now, Bardo.”

“See you at nine-thirty, mister. Ninety-sixth and Fifth. Near the entrance to the children’s park.”

Flip repeated, “Near the entrance to the children’s park,” and hung up.

“Did your hair grow back while you was talkin’ on that telephone, man?” Leemie laughed.

“Yeah,” Flip said, thinking maybe a guy could sell stuff like that in a pool hall. “In fact, I gotta get it cut. You know?”

T
HAT
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
when he left the zoo and headed downtown on the subway to Dr. Mannerheim’s, Manny thought about it again. The box on his lap, with air holes punched in the side of it, contained Sincere, and Manny held it there as firmly and carefully and gently as though there were a freshly baked layer cake inside. Actually he had thought about it all week, until even his father had noticed something was different about him, and had said, “Is visiting that psychologist making you mope around this way, Emanuel? I’m not sure it’s a good thing for you at all. Young people got enough trouble in this world.”

His mother had said that was why he was going to the psychologist in the first place, to see what the trouble
was.

Manny didn’t tell them about the man in the park, but he kept thinking about it. Why had the man picked him, Manny Pollack? What had there been about him that had made the man choose him? Was there something that marked him as different from other people?

He had two peculiar notions that seemed to him to be more pernicious than peculiar. One was that the man had known that Manny had come from the doctor’s; had perhaps waited for Manny outside the apartment house on Central Park West, and followed him into the park. The man had thought, maybe, that Manny was visiting a psychologist because
that
was what was wrong with him.

The other was an even more fearful notion: that perhaps Dr. Mannerheim herself had planted the man there, to test Manny — to see if Manny was that way. (And he had flunked the test — gone with the man, let the man give him a ride home afterward! God!)

In a way, it was as though life were one big trap and Manny was walking smack into it; and in another way it was as though life were just a whirlpool and Manny was perpetually spinning around in it without ever coming to any stopping point. If it were not for Sincere, Manny believed, there would be nothing of his own that he could know and have and understand.

Manny raised the top of the box a crack and looked in at his pet “We’re almost there, boy,” he whispered, patting the sides of the box tenderly. “Then we won’t move for a while and you can sleep.”

Having Sincere along with him that afternoon made Manny feel somehow more safe. Not many people knew very much about snakes, and Manny knew all about them. How many people had snakes of their own?

If Sincere were to be set loose in the park, everyone would probably scream, and someone would probably want to throw a rock at him. It was because no one really gave snakes a chance, or thought they had feelings, or knew they only meant to try to live as best they could in this world, because they weren’t as smart or friendly as dogs, for instance.

Nothing’s going to happen to you, Sinny, Manny thought to himself. I’m going to take care of you the rest of my life. He held the box more tightly, and looked down at it with affection.

It was strange, Manny mused, that Dr. Mannerheim liked snakes too. Women especially never did. But she did; and the first time he had ever gone to her, she had listened to him tell her all about Sincere. She had been interested. She had not interrupted him or smirked or doubted him or patronized him; and Manny remembered that at the end of that hour everything his mother had ever inferred about his “morbid interest” in snakes seemed unimportant. Dr. Mannerheim and Bardo Raleigh were the only two people Manny had ever met (outside zoo-keepers) who seemed to like to hear him discuss Sinny, and snakes in general. Johnny and Flip never had much to say when the subject came up. But at both sessions Dr. Mannerheim had
asked
Manny about Sincere, and Bardo had told him a million thousand times he ought to be a herpetologist.

Walking down Central Park West, after he got off the Eighth Avenue subway, Manny decided that his notion about the doctor planting the man in the park was crazy. A person who liked snakes that well wouldn’t pull a dirty trick like that on a guy. He was sorry he had ever thought of it; particularly if she ever read it in his mind or some other darn thing. He would be careful not to think about any of it while he was there.

Maybe things like that just happened to people without any reason at all; to
anybody.
Maybe … Manny bet Bardo would know. He might ask him when he saw him that night; even just coming out and ask him. You could do that with Bardo, and he’d
tell
you. Bardo always told you.

The sun was out and Manny started to whistle a march he had heard somewhere, and he didn’t feel too bad at all. He walked into the apartment house lobby, poked the elevator button with his finger, and looked at a little girl pushing a toy auto across the lobby. While he waited, he leaned down and said, “Hi!”

“Brrrrrrrrr,” the girl said, imitating a motor running.

“That’s a pretty car,” Manny told her.

“Not a car. ‘S a bus.” Manny laughed. “I guess I was too dumb to see that,” he said.

The little girl looked up at him, a finger caught in her mouth.

“What you got in the box?” “Oh,” Manny said, “a new suit.”

A silly little kid like that would be scared of a snake.

“I got a new dress,” the girl said.

Manny ruffled her hair playfully, and got into the elevator. Maybe he’d tell Dr. Mannerheim about the little girl. It would be a good topic of conversation when they ran out of things to say. The doctor never seemed to be able to think up any new subjects. Besides, not everybody liked kids or treated them nice. Lots of guys Manny knew would have said that it was
so a
car, that it wasn’t a bus at all. Lots of guys Manny could think of would have tried to dangle the snake over her head and make her bawl or something. They wouldn’t have been considerate like Manny. He’d handled the whole thing pretty neatly…. Hadn’t he?

She was wearing some kind of light cherry-colored dress, and she was smiling. Not until Manny saw her in the doorway when she answered the bell did he realize he was looking forward to their talk. Again he blamed himself for ever in the world thinking she had sicked that man on him; a thing like that could happen to anyone. Deliberately he put it out of his mind, because she had a way of looking him right square in the eye, as though she could fathom what he was thinking. All Manny wanted to do was show her Sincere, and he realized a little guiltily that his mother didn’t know he had taken the snake with him, because she was in Yonkers for the day, and she wouldn’t be home until after, dinner.

Before she had left she had directed Manny: “… and don’t sit like a dummy when you get there. How’s the doctor going to help you if you don’t tell her what you brood about all the time?”

Manny followed the doctor through the hallway into the living room. There were two Cokes on the coffee table, two glasses, and a bowl of ice cubes. Manny sat down on the couch and put his box on the floor between his legs. She leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.

She said, “What would you say to a Coke?”

“I guess so,” Manny said. He didn’t reach for the bottle in front of him.

“Oh? You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“Sure, I want one,” Manny said. “One won’t hurt.”
“One
won’t hurt?”

“You know,” Manny answered, grabbing the neck of the bottle and pouring the coca-cola over an ice cube he had plunked into the glass, “they’re supposed to do something to your teeth.”

“Really?”

“Sure. They rot them.”

The doctor gave a little laugh and Manny looked over at her questioningly. “Didn’t you ever hear that?” “N-no,” she said. “But — ” “They rot your teeth. Cokes rot your teeth.” She told him he didn’t have to drink it, and he said that was all right. He said, “I didn’t say it to make you feel bad.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

Manny said, “I just came from the Bronx Zoo. I took Sincere up so the man there could see him. I took him up once before but the man wasn’t there. Only
today
he was.”

“Oh?” She nodded pleasantly. “And what did he say?”

“He told me how to make the cage warm for him this winter. My room gets kind of chilly, and the temperature’s very important. You see, kings catch cold easy.”

Manny reached down beside him where the box was and he said, “Did you notice I was carrying something when I came in?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Manny said, suddenly a little bashful now, but proud too, and anxious to see the doctor’s surprise, “it’s Sincere. I got him with me. Want to see him?”

The doctor’s face was placid and she said, hesitating only for a moment, “Certainly I want to see him. I’ve heard so much about Sincere.”

Manny took the top off the box and lifted Sincere up, and Sincere wrapped his long body around Manny’s arm and flicked his forked black tongue. Dr. Mannerheim sat quietly in her chair, drawing the smoke in from her cigarette, looking at the snake.

“I’ll put him down here on the table so you can see him in the light,” Manny said, pushing aside the glasses, placing the writhing snake there. “Lookit him now. Isn’t he a beauty?”

The snake trailed his black slackness soft-bellied down over the edge of the table, and Manny shoved him back up on top of it.

“Stay there, fellow,” Manny said. “The doctor wants to look you over, boy. See if you got any complexes.” Manny chuckled and glanced at the doctor, who was moving her chair slightly back from the table. “Like him?” Manny asked, pleased.

“He’s f-fine,” the doctor said, but she edged her chair farther back, and her face was a little taut, her fingers liightening on the sides of her chair. “Sh-should he be loose ike this, Emanuel? It won’t make him nervous or upset or anything?”

“Naw!” Manny exclaimed. “Sincere’s a real trooper!

He’s been on the subway and everything today. He’s a world traveler, aren’t you, fellow, hmmm?” Manny gave Sincere a pat, and beamed at him with bright, shining eyes.

The snake lopped around the bowl containing the ice cubes, flicked his forked tongue again, and arched his hose-shaped head up in a curve, his dead eyes musing a moment, his body still.

“ ‘At’s right, boy, you look the joint over.” Manny laughed. “Lookit him! He wonders where he is. What a curious character you are, Sinny, boy. Lookit him, Dr. Mannerheim.”

“I’m looking at him,” the doctor said in a strained voice, but Manny didn’t notice that her tone was different this time from any other.

He said, “Want to pet him? He’s got real silky skin.”

“N-no, Emanuel — thanks. I haven’t washed my hands and — “

“Oh, your hands are clean enough, Doc. Cripes, your hands are plenty clean. Don’t you worry ‘bout that.”

“No, Emanuel, really,” the doctor said, as Manny started to steer Sincere’s body around to the edge of the table facing her. “I think not!”

Then Manny noticed. He looked at her strangely, as if there were something about her sound that he could not understand, and he said incredulously, “Is something wrong about Sincere?”

“Emanuel, don’t be silly. Of course not. I — I like Sincere. You know I like him.” She kept staring at the wiggling snake. “We’ve talked about him so often, Emanuel. You know I — “

“But you never saw him before,” Manny said in a thick sort of voice. “Today was the first time and you’re acting funny. You’re acting funny,” Manny said, as though he weren’t really talking to her, but to himself now, still looking at her. “You’re acting like other people.”

The doctor’s face was pale, and her lips moved to protest with the right words, but the snake slid off the table then, writhing like lightning, a part of
him
that was left behind convulsing in undignified haste and then disappearing to the floor.

“Emanuel!” the woman called out, jumping quickly from the chair and backing away. “Get him! Don’t let him loose like this, Emanuel. Emanuel!”

For a moment Manny was frozen numb. He saw Sincere gliding on the thick carpet, innocuously going along the way he did all the time, the way he was made to do, moving on his ribs the way a snake does, because there’s no other way for him to move, and then he saw the woman’s face. There was nothing soft about her any more; her brow was creased in hard lines and her lips tightened. Her voice had a shrill edge on it:

“Get him back in the box, Emanuel!” she said. “Will you get that snake!”

Manny just stood there. “You hate him,” he said. “You hate him because he’s a snake. You didn’t mean it when you said you liked snakes. You wanted to trick me.” He said it the way a person who has to convince himself of something says things, the way a person says things when he can’t believe them, because he does not want to. “You’re
afraid
of him. You never even listened when I explained he couldn’t hurt you,” Manny mumbled. “You never even — “

Sincere was near her now, and she screwed up her face and shook the chair and tried to scare him off with the motion. Then Manny moved. There was a vacant look to his eyes, as though he were sleepwalking, and his body moved that way too, stiffly, but surely, crossing the room, past her where she stood near the wall, cowering.

“He’s under the couch, Emanuel,” she said.

Manny said flatly, “I know where he is, Dr. Mannerheim.”

Then he got down on his knees and picked Sincere up gently, saying, “C’mon, fellow,” and he carried him to the box, and he put him in it.

He stood there holding the box, and though he did not look at the doctor, he could tell she was smoothing her hair with her hands, moving away from the wall where she was standing; and he heard her sigh. It seemed a long while before she said, “Our session wasn’t very successful today, was it, Emanuel?” She sounded sad somehow, and tired.

“I don’t know about sessions. I don’t know about them,” Manny answered her. He ran his fingers along the box, caressing it, as though that would soothe the snake inside. He wouldn’t look at the doctor; he couldn’t and he didn’t want to.