But there is a difference between admitting your fault and trying to rectify it. I have to do something. I can’t just live like a trail bum in the Nevada hills. If I go back to New York, at least, I will have my mother, and Monsignor Ford, and Archie, and people who have been “interested” in me, to use Archie’s word. The air force is giving me a clean slate, and now I have to look for a new opportunity to make something of myself.
I don’t know how many second chances a man can get in this world, but I know I have to ask God for one more.
I can tell now that Patches has his eye on the calf as well. The calf turns and runs, and I can see the double crossed bars of the cow as she also bolts.
We are pretty close to them, and I take my rope from over the horn. I grab the honda, my hand firmly over the knot, and swing about six feet of rope our while I throw my spurs into Patches’ rear shanks. He doesn’t need much kicking or encouragement, for he loves to do this, run for a calf across the sandy grass flats. I keep the calf on my right. The little guy runs about half as fast as Patches, and I now have my right hand about two feet down from the knot, holding firm onto the reins and the rest of the rope in my left hand. Patches is running full gallop, and I am yelling “giddap, giddap, yippee” to frighten the calf, to keep it from thinking too much. Yelling and galloping, I am now swinging the rope in moderate, graceful circles until I am five or six feet from the calf, and I let the rope loose, and it flies in circles over the calf’s head and falls onto its shoulder blades, and I pull back fast before he runs through the loop, and the rope falls down and secures around his neck, and I take what rope is left in my right hand and make two fast turns around the saddle horn as I pull back on the reins with all my strength. Patches doesn’t want to stop, which is his biggest problem, and I pull back harder and harder, hoping the reins won’t break, because if a rein breaks, I’ll lose the calf and the rope, and it will take me forever to stop Patches.
Finally, Patches stops, and the calf gets pulled to the ground by its own momentum.
I am now patting the horse’s neck, saying “Good boy, good boy,” pulling back gently on the reins so that Patches is keeping the rope taut. I get off the horse and follow the rope down to the calf. It’s a real little guy, maybe two months old. I pick him up, plop him easily onto the grass-patched sand, and pull the knife from my jeans pocket. Two small triangles is all I have to cut from his right ear. People can remove and replace a metal tag, but no one can change an ear mark like that. It is a registered cut, along with Dave’s brand. Now if a federal inspector rides these hills and sees this calf sucking on Dave’s cow, he will also see that the ear mark is Dave’s, too, because no cow will let some strange calf at her teats.
I take the cuts. The calf does not feel them, for it is dead skin I am cutting. There is a lot of whining, but the calf lies easily on the ground until I take the rope from around his neck. I can see the cow not far off, and so can the calf. He has a bouncy spring to his gait as he runs to his mother.
These cows and bulls and calves are closely controlled in this great open and fenceless space. It has been like this for more than a hunded years, and the system works.
Patches is standing still, my rope hanging limply from the saddle horn alongside him. I grab his reins, pat his neck a few times, and kiss the sweaty top of his nose.
“Good boy, Patches,” I say as I pull myself back into the saddle and wind the rope in curls over the saddle horn. “There is a calf that won’t get waylaid, anyway. It’s a good system for the cows.”
Patches seems to nod his head as we continue to walk the hills looking for more of Dave Iverson’s calves.
I laugh a little. I don’t usually carry on a conversation with Patches, but now I just laugh a little more and say, “If there was a system like this for people, maybe none of us would get lost, huh?”
M
y mother was right. There are no good times in a persons life, like in historical periods. Just different times. Or maybe all time is just a series of little difficulties and challenges wedged between big ones, and if you’re lucky, you are able to squeeze as much happiness as is possible between the beginning and the end. The key is to know when you are happy, and I have recently come to think that I know when I am happy.
It is hard to put into words, but I know.
When things are going right, I can feel it inside.
I can feel my soul dancing.
This is my first week working as a mechanic’s helper in the pipe-fitting shop of the New York Central Railroad, and it is Friday afternoon. I just received my first paycheck, $94 for forty hours’ work, which, when you consider I was making $180 a month in the air force, you can understand why my soul was dancing.
I have no great interest in being money hungry or in the accumulation of things, but I don’t know of any other way to make a judgment about how I’m doing. I suppose I could measure my happiness, but somehow that often seems to be directly tied into the amount of cash in the pocket.
I know that money can’t buy happiness, but without it you can’t buy anything.
I was flat broke after I bought that little gold ring for my mother, and she was flat broke when I gave it to her. Sure, she would have been just as happy if I gave her a little pencil drawing I made, but I was made happier by having the forty bucks to buy her the ring. The thing about true happiness, I guess, is to recognize that both of us would have been just as happy if we put the money for the ring in the poor box, for the thought of doing something generous for another is what carries the day. If you can find a scale to weigh the value, you’ll find that a generous thought is always heavier than gold.
I’ve just cashed my railroad check and my pockets are flush with money. I’ll be able to pay my mother back for Patches in just a couple of months, and everything seems to be going great.
My mother is still working for Ma Bell, and still doing the ironing for neighbors.
Billy left Hunter College, but he started up again at New York University. He’s working full-time at Kips Bay as the gym instructor, but I have the best-paying job in the family.
“The Irish are getting up in the world,” my mother said at breakfast this morning, folding over the pages of the
News.
“You bet,” I said.
My mother laughed. “I’m talking about Senator Kennedy,” she said. “He’s running for president.”
“He’s no Al Smith,” Billy said.
“But he is Irish,” my mother said.
“So was Al Smith,” my brother answered.
“If he can get me on the police department or the fire department,” I said, “I’ll vote for him.”
There is enough money in the family now to buy all the clothes we need and go to a movie whenever we want. Everyone is working, and, so to speak, there is a chicken in every pot.
Billy told me recently that New York University is trying out a special program for people like me who have no high school, but who have a General Education Development certificate from the military. I’m going down to Washington Square tomorrow to see about it.
There is just an hour or so until quitting time.
People who work for the railroad, I have found, have developed a lot of sloppy attitudes about work.
At least, I have never seen anything like the shirking that goes on in Grand Central Station, where every afternoon like clockwork the whole working corps slips into the dark train cars, sitting idle in the terminal, for a lazybones nap. Some mechanics and their helpers even lay themselves out in nice clean sheets in the Pullman cars, the sleeper cars, for the last two hours every day.
It is all pretty boring to me, and since there is nothing for me to do, I have been carrying around a paperback book so that I can sit under a light on the back tracks to read until the workers come out of the railroad cars at ten to four.
It is like a retreating army at ten to four every afternoon as the plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, carpenters, the railroad cops, pipe coverers, and maintenance men pile out of the Pullmans. I know that this kind of nesting can get you fired, and I don’t want any part of it.
But today, my mechanic, Jimmy Niven, doesn’t go to the Pullmans, and he takes me to the north end of track 16. He hands me his flashlight and gives me an order.
“Go down under the track,” he says, “and find my tool bag, a canvas one. It should be right beneath us.”
A helper has to do what his mechanic says, and I don’t think much of it.
I jump down on the tracks and look for one of the small entrances beneath the platform, squares cut into the concrete walls of the platform above. The steam and water pipes and the electrical conduit run beneath these platforms in Grand Central Station, and I guess Niven was working there before I came on the job.
I put the flashlight on and crawl into the hole. There is just room enough for a man to get around on his hands and knees. It is tropical-jungle damp because of the heat of the steam pipes, and I suddenly begin to sweat. I aim the flashlight quickly left to right, and I see a tool bag about twenty-five feet down the long and narrow chamber, on its side on the dusty, brick-strewn floor of hard-compacted earth.
I am more than ten feet into this crawl space when I realize I am hearing a strange noise, a sort of fluttering sound. It is a weird sound, something I have never before heard, and I throw my light beam upward, and I am stopped like glue in my crawl by what I see.
The walls and the ceiling above are covered with water bugs, not a clear inch of concrete shows through, and they are vibrating and crawling over one another like ants. Not one is less than two inches long, and many have antennae which go another two inches. I have never seen anything like this, and I am frozen.
There could be a pot of gold next to that tool bag, I am thinking, and I would give it up in a second. I just have to get out of here because I know that this shaking ceiling, like the walls full of roaches I used to think about as a boy in my top bunk, is going to fall down right on top of me, and they will carry me away the way ants can carry a dead fly.
I have to get out of here, I am thinking, before it crumbles and it is raining water bugs.
God.
I remember picking up that beer bottle when I was a kid, putting it to my mouth for the last drop of beer left by the aunts and uncles who had been singing Irish songs, and that scurrying roach falling into my mouth, spitting it out, thinking that I would die in a minute, the roach germs running rampant through my body. I know I have to get out of this scourge, this plague, before I pass out, and tell Jimmy Niven that he will have to crawl for his own tool bag, that he can stick this job in with his dirty laundry, that I don’t care what he does, but I’m not going in this torture chamber to get a bag of tools someone forgot.
God.
The sound is like a purring interrupted by coughing from a consumptive cat. I am still frozen.
I can’t tell Niven that I won’t do it. I can’t risk my job. I am making all this money, I am paying back my mother, and this is the first real shaft of light I have had over my life in New York, the first job I have found since I came home from Nevada. These jobs are hard to get, and I wouldn’t have gotten this one if Denny Reade hadn’t knocked on the door to say that he heard I was home and looking for a job. “A messenger from the angels,” my mother called him.
Denny Reade isn’t more than a few years older than me, and I don’t even know him that well, but he got me this job because people on 56th Street help each other out, like the Pennsylvania Dutch who put up each other’s barns. If I back out of this corridor, I will disappoint my mother, and Denny Reade will think that I’m a loser, and everybody on 56th Street, the whole neighborhood, will think me a yellow-striped loser.
I can’t back out.
But I’m frozen here. I can’t go in, either.
I remember now what my mother said when she had me make an hour’s worth of stretched faces. “Cross your finger, one on the other, and press down as hard as you can. And say ‘stop,’ over and over.”
But now I want to say “go,” and not “stop.”
Now I have one finger crossed onto the other, pressing down like a vise, my eyes closed.
“Go, go, go, go, go,” I am saying out loud as I inch nearer and nearer to the tool bag, feeling out before me, not wanting to open my eyes, knowing that to see a water bug on me is going to be harder to take than thinking one is on me. I can live with the thought as long as I keep my eyes closed.
I am not thinking at all now of the vibrations above and around me. I am wondering if the builders put the water bugs under these tracks because they knew the Irish would be working for the railroad.
Finally, I feel the tool bag, and I turn quickly, dragging it behind me. Finally, I open my eyes, and I see the light at the opening door, and scurry as fast as I can, feeling my insides fluttering now like there are a million winged things in my stomach, flapping their two million wings trying to fly out.
Now I am out on the track again, and I look to see if there are any trains coming. The third rail is across from me, and I have to remember that even if I am covered with water bugs, I will have to keep watching that rail. I drop the tool bag and wipe my hands all over my body like I am wet and have fallen into a sand pit. I look all around, and I do not see a single bug. Not one. I take three deep breaths to bring my blood pressure down as I throw the heavy canvas tool bag up on the track.
Jimmy is lighting a cigarette, and he watches me climb up on the platform out of the corner of his eye. I know that he knows there are millions of water bugs down below us, and he is just waiting for me to say something.
But I don’t say anything.
I just carry his bag up the track because that’s my job. We are silent until we enter the great open space of the Grand Central Terminal.
“Well?” Jimmy says, a little grin on either side of the cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“Well, what?” I answer.