What Is All This? (46 page)

He picked up a Boston lettuce at the supermarket in the next shopping center, pocketed a package of Contac and brought the lettuce to the checkout stand farthest from the balcony office overlooking the front part of the store.

“Hi, how are you?” the girl said, smiling at him as if he were a familiar customer, though he'd only been here once. “Only one item? You could've gone to the express register,” and he said This one was moving fast, and only the lettuce because I forgot to get it before.” She rang up the lettuce gave him his change, “Have a nice night,” and he said Thanks. You too.”

He knew he wouldn't be caught this time. He hadn't looked uncomfortable, which he was sure he did the last time, or dallied to decide which checkout stand to use or tapped the jacket pocket at the stand or felt the flap on the way out. It had taken one casual look around in the drug aisle and a cough that doubled him over as he slipped the Contac into his pocket, and now he was in his car and driving out of the lot, and he wanted to howl and cheer but tempered his appearance to that of a tired worker who'd never sully his family's reputation or jeopardize his future for such a petty theft.

Home, Ginny yelled from the bedroom “Rod? I'll be up and fix us dinner in a moment.”

He told her to stay in bed: that he was more than happy to make supper for the three of them. He put together a meatloaf and put it and the yams into the oven.

Jesse came into the kitchen. “Make me cereal. Make Jess cereal, Rod.”

He kissed him on top of his head, lifted him into the highchair and in a few minutes had two slices of cinnamon toast and a bowl of instant oatmeal in front of him, with milk, butter, wheat germ and sugar on it. “For you, Jesse old king.”

“It's hot,” Jesse said, waving his favorite spoon in the air. “Cereal too hot for Jess, right?”

“I'll taste it,” he did, and said “It's okay; it won't burn you.”

He held the package of Contac behind his back and went into the bedroom. Ginny was in bed. “Guess,” he said, and when she said “Hmm, let's see,” and then gave him that artfully dumb expression of hers of being completely taken in by his surprise, he produced the Contac.

“You're a mindreader,” she said, pushing the covers aside to sit up and take the package. “I need them so badly, and you knew, Teeny, you knew.” She tore out one of the capsules and held it between two fingertips. “Do you think they work as well as those silly ads say? I got one heck of a cold on that trip.”

They better work at the price.”

She looked at the price on the package and whistled. “Dollar forty-nine? For ten pills? That's crazy. You're really extravagant, really too good to me,” and she swallowed the capsule without water. About thirty seconds later she said “You're not going to believe this but I'm already feeling much better. I bet it makes me sleep better too. And listen,” and she breathed in and out extra loudly, “I think it's already unclogging my nose.”

Henry Sampson was awakened from a deep sleep by children yelling at the top of their lungs. He edged his body across the bed, picked at his Baby Ben. Eight-forty, he saw, squinting at the clock. Goddamn, he thought, it's not even nine, and Sunday, no less, so why can't the school lock its gates and help a man get some sleep? He shut his eyes and hugged the pillow to his ears, but still heard the kids in the schoolyard that faced his windows, now choosing up sides for Capture the Flag.

“Timmy you're with me. Laura, get over there. Larry, Mary, Walt with me. Sylvia, Carole and Junior with Louie. That okay with you, Louie—five against five?”

“Fine with me.”

Henry moved the pillow from his face. The sides were unfair the way he looked at it—one team having two more girls than the other—and he was surprised Louie hadn't put up a squawk. And really, this should be the healthy unperturbed attitude he should always take to their games—even squeezing a bit of it into the What the Native Children Do section of the Washington guidebook he was writing—if these kids weren't the reason for most of his present troubles. He had come here, after having saved enough money as a waiter in New York, two months ago—in April, when the weather was still cool and dry, the windows of his cheap second-story apartment barely open and the neighborhood quiet. His goal was to write his fourth guidebook—a glib, witty first-person up-to-date account of the city's high spots, night life, places to see, tour, eat at, drive by, and plainly avoid. In the first six weeks he completed most of his research, browsed through all the public buildings, monuments, memorials, museums and parks worth noting, and part of the day, when it was still quiet outside and the temperature comfortable, written what he considered to be the most exciting imaginative prose of any of his books.

Then the weather changed, the days and nights becoming hotter and stickier than he'd ever experienced. This was a valuable piece of information left out of most of the Washington books, and he already included it in the What to Wear section at the opening of the book. (DC's weather is ideal for the gracious Southern clothing store owner. Here there are truly four distinct seasons—the fall and early spring being as delightful and pleasingly capricious as any city in the U.S. But the heat spells of late spring and summer? Let me inform you, dear travelers. It would be as insufferably stifling as the muggiest of Middle Eastern and Asian cities I've lived in if not for the ubiquitous air-conditioning.) And with the late May heat came jarring street noises, loud arguments and TV sounds from surrounding apartments, and the disturbances in the schoolyard of St. James: from the 8:25 morning lineup to the P.T. classes and after-school games of the neighborhood, kids. A week ago he decided that only at night and on Sundays would he ever find the peace to get work done at home. So during the day he now got up when the first few kids came into the yard, downed a quick breakfast and spent most of the time walking around the city, reading and napping in Rock Creek Park, editing copy there that he'd written the previous night when he'd drunk too much, and going to another tedious double feature in an air-conditioned theater.

All of a sudden it was silent outside. Maybe the kids had been kicked out of the yard or went to play somewhere else. He relaxed in bed, felt himself getting sleepy, for a while imagined himself playing Capture the Flag, freeing all the prisoners. Henry the Kid beating the other team home with the flag and being congratulated as he scored the winning point.

But a boy shook him out of his thoughts: “By the count of ten you pimps better be over that line or you lose the flag. One, two, three, four, five, six…”

Henry wanted to yell for the boy to get the hell away from his window.

“Capture the flag. Free him, free him,” a boy and girl screamed as Henry got out of bed. “I got the punk,” another boy shouted as Henry turned the shower on in the bathroom and put his head under it. When that didn't cool him off and calm his nerves, he got in the tub and let the cold water rise around him.

He ducked his head into the water and thought God, if this isn't nice, so nice, so perfect, so goddamn completely perfect, and came up for air, held his nose and dropped underwater again. It was so peaceful and comfortable in the tub that he pictured himself working here. He'd seen it done in a movie once—Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable sitting in a half-filled tub, typewriter and writing paper on a wood plank set up in front of him like a bed table, a cigarette stuck confidently to his bottom lip as he knocked off the last few lines of a prize-winning news article or novel. Confident and cheerful now himself, he scrubbed his face and hair with a washrag and through a soap bubble forming on his lips began to sing “Oh Suzanna.”

“Oh Suzanna, oh don't you cry for me. For I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”

It was all he knew of the song and he repeated those lines twice more and was giving out with what was possibly his highest range since his college chorus days, when a group of intentionally clashing voices outside joined in with him. He got up and slammed down the window. He still heard them mimicking him, so he threw on his terrycloth robe, drying himself with it as he went into the kitchen, and yelled from the partially opened curtains “Will you kids please stop!”

They continued to sing—the entire song.

“Didn't you hear? Now you had your little joke, so can it.”

He couldn't see them. They were behind a row of bushes inside the yard's mesh fence, about fifteen feet from his building. The only other time he shouted at them was last week. They were fighting among themselves, whistling, screeching, cursing, and rattling the fence when one boy climbed it, then throwing pebbles at the boy when he was perched on top. “Stop that; you're going to kill him,” Henry yelled, and the kids scattered and the boy climbed down on Henry's side and ran away. Now he felt he was their target, and a regular sitting duck also. Having finished the “Oh Suzanna” song, they now baited him with the first stanza of “Lulu had a baby, she named him Sunny Jim.” By the time Lulu got excited and grabbed Jim by his cocktail, ginger ale, five cents a glass, Henry was in the bedroom, angrily zippering up his Bermuda shorts and prepared to show his face at the window for the first time to them and demand they stop bugging him.

They'd ended the song when he reached the living room, and didn't follow it with anything. Relieved, he flopped into the easy chair with a book. It was one of the forty-odd history and guidebooks about Washington he'd borrowed from several public libraries—the main purpose being to condense what this writer and others had said into tiny sections of his own book. The title of his book, as his unpublished books on Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco has been similarly titled, was:
Henry Sampson's Modern Guidebook to Washington, DC
. Below that would be the subtitle: “Your most perfect little companion to all places for all people. Meet the natives and their environment and be as comfortable and knowledgeable as you would in your own hometown.”

He never got to know these other cities that well, having only enough time and money to stay in Philadelphia for a long weekend and never having the bus fare to get to New Orleans. And he'd only spent a few hours in San Francisco—where he first came up with the idea for a series of guidebooks—before shipping out on a World War II troopship to Australia. The Washington book would be different. Not only was he getting a true feeling of the city but the writing was more informal, something his other books, which now seemed like staid travelogue scripts, entirely lacked. These would be the keys to getting it published. And publication would create such a demand for his previous books, once he changed them to first person and did a bit more personal research and lightened up on the language, that he didn't think it'd be more than a few years before he'd be known as one of the most readable authorities on American travel. He was musing about all this—the money, notoriety, delicious free meals and luxurious hotel accommodations that would accompany his success—when he heard the children shouting outside again.

“Louie, you're the stupidest ass I ever seen,”

“You are, you mother.”

“My mother, what?”

“Just your mother, you mother.”

Henry tried to ignore their argument. He sat at his work table, typed “–37–” on the upper lefthand corner of the page, and continued typing and erasing for two minutes and six satisfying lines. “One especially intriguing area often missed by most tourists is DC's own Chinatown, which is only a stone's throw from the Capitol Building. It's made up of an assortment of exotic shops run by native Chinese, some of the wares, a reliable source informed me, reputed to be smuggled straight from Red China, and under the very noses of your congressmen, no less! One particularly hospitable Mandarin restaurant I had several outstanding dinners at is the…” He was looking through his dining-out notebook, which didn't list the restaurants he'd eaten in but only the more expensive places he'd jotted down many of the dishes and prices from the menus posted out front, when he heard another shouting match in the schoolyard.

“I said get your freaking hands off me, Ronnie,” a girl said.

“What're you, crazy?” the boy said. “I wouldn't touch you with a cruddy pole.”

“Yeah, I bet,” she said; “On your mother's life,” he answered, and so it went, till Henry ripped the page out of the type-writer and bunched it up and flung it to the floor. That's it,” he said, and he rushed out of the apartment and down the service stairs to the rear entrance. He calmed his rage once he got outside, moved closer to the schoolyard till he stood under the plaque above the door in the fence—a mutilated crucified Christ dangling over the school's name and motto, both written in Latin.

“Pighead Sylvia's got a hole in her sock,” a boy was singing to “Glory, Glory, Halleluiah,” but stopped when Henry entered the yard.

“No need to stop,” he said. “You have a pretty good voice, in fact, although the words are a bit nasty. Anyway, I only came down from that building there to ask if you kids could tone it down some.”

They all stepped back a few feet. He smiled and tried to think of something to say that would make them trust him. His eyes settled on tough-looking girl with messy hair and holes in her socks. Has to be Sylvia, he thought, laughing to himself. And the short kid there is probably Junior. He was trying to determine which ones were Ronnie and Louie when a boy came forward and said “Yeah, and who chose you to tell us what to do—God?”

Which intolerable bastard is he? Henry thought, but said “And who might you be, my good friend?”

“I might be Ronnie Peterson, that's who, and I'm not your good friend.” He turned around to the others and squeezed his nose, and they all laughed uneasily.

Of course. The more the boy talked and swaggered, he knew it could only be Ronnie; the one who yelled the loudest, complained the longest, had the foulest mouth, constantly tried to feel up Sylvia and was always bullying someone. How many times had he heard his ugly shrill mouth, pictured these pugnacious mannerisms. Ten pages. Ten pages at least he could be advanced in his book if it wasn't for this one kid alone.

“Look, Ronnie…that's your name, right? What are you—ten, eleven, twelve? So you're old enough to understand what I mean. Because every day I'm awakened by your loud games—”

“I'm not here any morning but Saturday and Sunday, so don't be blaming me for those other days.”

“Who's blaming anyone? I'm just saying I've got a very important government night job, and sleeping Sunday morning means a lot to me.”

“Well, I don't know, mister, because Sundays this yard's a public playground for everybody, and today's Sunday.”

The yard's also part of a religious school, and because today's Sunday you should treat it with particular respect.”

“It isn't my school.”

“It's others', though—Catholic people. And it means a kind of holiness to them that took almost two thousand years to create.”

“Well, school's closed today, so it isn't nothing.”

That's right,” a boy said, getting next to Ronnie.

Henry tried to put the voice and face of this boy together. Then it clicked and he blurted out “Timmy Santangelo.”

“How'd you know?” the boy said, then glanced at Ronnie. Ronnie returned his dumbfounded look.

“Don't be surprised,” Henry said. “I've been hearing you kids so long, I'm bound to know your names. Let's see now,” and he ran his finger across his bottom lip as he observed a tall thin girl. “You're Mary,” he said, and she nodded. “Mary…? Mary…?”

“Mitchell,” she said, covering her face with her hands and giggling.

“Mary Elizabeth Mitchell.” Some of the other kids inched up as if they wanted to be identified too.

Henry pointed at one of the boys, closed his eyes and thought Who the hell could this one be? Louie? Maybe Walt, or Larry, even. He knew it'd floor them all if he could say the boy's name when he opened his eyes.

That's Junior, mister,” Ronnie said. “And the little shrimp next to him is Walt. And after Walt is Louie and Carole. But what do you want to know for—you a cop?”

“Far from it,” he said, wishing Ronnie had given him a few more seconds. “And also, I think I deserve something like a little more respect from you. After all,” and he stepped closer to Ronnie, who suddenly looked frightened and yelled “Run, you dumb pimps, run,” and all of them except Ronnie and Timmy took off and stopped about twenty feet away.

“Why'd you tell them to run?” Henry said. “I'm not after any of you.”

“Just take a walk, mister.”

That goes double for me,” Timmy said, catching his thumbnail under his top front teeth and snapping it at Henry.

Jesus, he thought, he's seen cocky kids before, but these two take the limit. So what does he do now? If he turns around, they'll jeer him till he reaches his building, and then let him have it under his window for a while, embarrassing him in front of his neighbors and of course prevent him from getting any kind of work done. All he can do is stand firm where he is and let them know he means no harm, though this time directing his entreaties to the other kids.