Recapitulation (34 page)

As the hunter came to the end of the counter their heads turned. “Well I’m a son of a bee,” Navy Edwards said, and scrambled off his stool. Next to him Billy Hammond half stood up, so that his pale yellow hair took a halo from the backbar lights. “Say!” Max Schmeckebier said. “Say, dot’s goot, dot’s pooty goot, Bwuce!”

But Bruce was watching his father so intently that he hardly heard them. He slid the string of ducks off his shoulder and swung them up onto the wide walnut bar. They landed solidly—offering or tribute or ransom or whatever they were. For a moment it was as if this little act were private between the two of them. He felt queerly moved, his stomach tightened in suspense or triumph. Then the old man’s pouchy eyes slipped from his and the old man came quickly forward along the counter and laid hands on the ducks.

He handled them as if he were petting kittens, his big white hands stringing the heads one by one from the wire. “Two spoonbill,” he said, more to himself than to the others crowding around. “Shovelducks. Don’t seem to see many of those any more. And two, no three, hen mallards and one drake. Those make good eating.”

Schmeckebier jutted his enormous lower lip. Knowing him for a stingy, crooked, suspicious little man, Bruce almost laughed at the air he could put on, the air of a man of probity about to make an honest judgment in a dispute between neighbors. “I take a budderball,” he said thickly. “A liddle budderball, dot is vot eats goot.”

An arm fell across Bruce’s shoulders, and he turned his head to see the hand with red hairs rising from its pores, the wristband of a gray silk shirt with four pearl buttons. Navy Edwards’ red face was close to his. “Come clean, now,” Navy said. “You shot ’em all sittin’, didn’t you?”

“I just waited till they stuck their heads out of their holes and let them have it,” Bruce said.

Navy walloped him on the back and convulsed himself laughing. Then his face grew serious and he bore down on Bruce’s shoulder. “By God, you could’ve fooled me. If I’d been makin’ book on what you’d bring in I’d’ve lost my shirt.”

“Such a pretty shirt, too,” Billy Hammond said.

Across the counter Harry Mason cradled a little drab duck in his hand. Its neck, stretched from the carrier, hung far down, but its body was neat and plump and its feet were waxy. Watching the sallow face of his father, Bruce thought it looked oddly soft.

“Ain’t that a beauty, though?” the old man said. “There ain’t a prettier duck made than a blue-wing teal. You can have all your wood ducks and redheads, all the flashy ones.” He spread a wing until the hidden band of bright blue showed. “Pretty?” he said, and shook his head and laughed suddenly as if he had not expected to. When he laid the duck with the others his eyes were bright with sentimental moisture.

So now, Bruce thought, you’re right in your element. You always did want to be back with the boys in the poolroom, pouring out to see the elk on somebody’s running board, or leaning on the bar with a schooner of beer talking baseball or announcing the weight of the big German brown somebody brought in in a cake of ice. We haven’t any elk or German browns right now, but we’ve got some nice ducks, a fine display along five feet of counter. And who brought them in? The student, the alien son. It must gravel you.

He drew himself a near beer. Several other men had come in and he saw three more stooping to look in the door beyond Sciutti’s. Two tables had started up; his father was hustling, filling orders. After a few minutes Schmeckebier and Navy went into the cardroom with three men. The poolroom lights were up bright, there was an ivory click of balls, a rumble of talk. The smoke-filled air was full of movement.

Still more people arrived, kids in high school athletic sweaters and bums from the fringes of skid road. They all stopped to look at the ducks, and Bruce saw glances at his waders, heard questions and answers. Harry’s boy. Some men spoke to him, deriving importance from the contact. A fellowship was promoted by the
ducks strung out along the counter. Bruce felt it himself. He was so mellowed by the way they spoke to him that when the players at the first table thumped with their cues, he got off his stool to rack them up and collect their nickels. It occurred to him that he ought to go to the room and get into a bath, but he didn’t want to leave yet. Instead he came back to the counter and slid the nickels toward his father and drew himself another near beer.

“Pretty good night tonight,” he said. The old man nodded and slapped his rag on the counter, his eyes already past Bruce and fixed on two youths coming in.

Billy Hammond wandered by and stopped by Bruce for a moment. “Well, time for my nightly wrestle with temptation.”

“I was just going to challenge you to a game of call shot.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Billy said, and let himself carefully out as if afraid a noise might disturb someone—a mild, gentle, golden-haired boy who looked as if he ought to be in some prep school learning to say “sir” to grown-ups instead of clerking in a girlie hotel. He was the only one of the poolroom crowd that Bruce half liked. He thought he understood Billy Hammond, a little.

He turned back to the counter to hear his father saying to Schmeckebier, “I don’t see how we could, on this rig. That’s the hell of it, we need a regular oven.”

“In my room in back,” Schmeckebier said. “Dot old electric range.”

“Does it work?”

“Sure. Vy not. I t’ink so.”

“By God,” Harry Mason said. “Nine ducks, that ought to give us a real old-fashioned feed.” He mopped the counter, refilled a coffee cup, came back to the end and pinched the breast of a duck, pulled out a wing and looked at the band of blue hidden among the drab feathers. “Just like old times, for a change,” he said, and his eyes touched Bruce’s in a look that might be anything from a challenge to an apology.

Bruce had no inclination to ease the strain between them. He did not forgive his father the cowardly flight to Los Angeles only hours before his mother died. He did not discount the possibility that his father’s profession might have had the effect of making Nola reconsider whom she wanted to marry. He neither forgot nor forgave the henna-haired woman who several times had
come to the pool hall late at night and waited on a bar stool while the old man closed up. Yet when his father remarked that the ducks ought to be drawn and plucked, he got to his feet.

“I could do ten while you were doing one,” his father said.

Heat spread into Bruce’s face. Carefully not looking at his father, he sat down again. “All right. You do them and I’ll take over the counter.”

So here he was, in the pool hall he had passionately sworn he would never do a minute’s work in, dispensing Mrs. Morrison’s meat pies and tamales smothered in chili, clumping behind the counter in the waders which all day had been the sign of his temporary freedom. Leaning back between orders, watching the Saturday-night activity of the place, he half understood why he had gone hunting, and why it had seemed essential that he bring his trophies back here.

That somewhat disconcerted understanding was still troubling him when his father came back. The old man had put on a clean apron and brushed his hair. His pouched eyes, brighter and less houndlike than usual, darted along the bar, counting, and across the bright tables, counting again. His eyes met Bruce’s, and both smiled. Both, Bruce thought, were a little astonished.

Later, propped in bed in the room, he put down the magazine he had been reading and stared at the drawn blinds, the sleazy drapes, and asked himself again why he was here. The excuse he used to himself, that he was only waiting for the beginning of the new term before returning to school, was only an excuse. He knew that he stayed because he either couldn’t get away or wouldn’t. He despised the pool hall, hated his father, was contemptuous of the people he lived among. He made no move to be friendly with them, or hadn’t until tonight, and yet he darted around corners to avoid meeting people he really did care about, people who had been his friends for years. Why?

He could not hold his mind to it. Within a minute he found himself reading again, diving deep, and when he made himself quit that, forced himself to look steadily at his father’s bed, his father’s shoes on the floor, his father’s soiled shirts hanging in the open closet, he told himself that all the home he had any more was this shabby room. He couldn’t pretend that by staying he was holding together the fragments of home and family. He
couldn’t fool himself that he had any function in his father’s life, or his father in his. He ought to look for a job so that he could at least keep his self-respect until February.

But the very thought of the effort it would take made him sleepy, and he knew what that was, too. Sleep was another evasion, like the torpor and monotony of his life. But he let drowsiness drift over him. Drowsily he pictured his father behind the counter tonight, vigorous and jovial, Mine Host, and he saw that the usual fretful petulance was not in his face.

He pulled off the light and dropped the magazine on the floor. Then he heard the rain, the swish and hiss of traffic in the wet street. He felt sad and alone, and he despised the coldness of his isolation. Nola crept into his mind and he drove her out as he would drive marauding chickens from a vegetable garden. Even brooding about his father was better than that. He thought of the failing body that only months ago had seemed tireless and bull-strong, of the face before it had sagged and grown dewlaps of flesh on the square jaws. He thought of the many failures, the self-deceptions, the schemes that never paid off, the jobs that never worked out, the hopeful starts that had always ended in excuses or flight. He thought of the eyes that had once filled him with fear, but that now could never quite meet, never quite hold, the eyes of his cold son.

Thinking of all this, and remembering when they were a family and when his mother was alive to hold them together, he felt pity, and he cried.

His father’s entrance awakened him. He heard the fumbling at the door, the creak, the quiet click, the footsteps that slid and groped in darkness, the body that bumped into something and halted, getting its bearings. He heard the deep sighing of the other bed as his father sat down on it, his father’s sighing breath as he bent to untie his shoes. Feigning sleep, he lay unmoving, breathing deeply and steadily, but an anguish of fury had leaped up in him, for he smelled the smells his father brought with him: wet wool, stale cigar smoke, liquor, and above all, more penetrating than any, spreading through the room and polluting everything there, the echo of cheap musky perfume.

The control Bruce imposed on his body was an ecstasy. He raged at himself for the weak sympathy to which he had yielded
earlier. One good night, he said to himself now, glaring upward. One lively Saturday night at the joint and he can’t contain himself, he has to go top off the evening with his lady friend. How? A drink in some illegal after-hours bar in Plum Alley? A drink in her room? Maybe just a trip to bed, blunt and immediate?

His jaws ached from the tight clamping of his teeth, but his orderly breathing went in and out, in and out, while the old man sighed into bed and creaked a little and lay still. The taint of perfume was even stronger. That was what his mother meant, that she could smell her. The sow must slop it on by the cupful. And so cuddly. Such a sugar baby. How’s my old sweetie tonight? It’s been too long since you came to see your baby. I should be real mad at you. The cheek against the lapel, the unreal hair against the collar, one foot coyly lifted, the perfume like poison gas tainting the clothes it touched.

The picture of his mother’s bureau drawers stood in his mind, the careless simple collection of handkerchiefs and gloves and lace collars and cuffs neat among dusty blue sachet packets that gave off a faint fragrance. They were all the scent she had ever used.

My God, he said, how can he stand himself?

After a while his father began to breathe heavily, then to snore. In the little prison of the room his breathing was obscene—loose and bubbling, undisciplined, animal. After quite a time he woke himself with a snort, murmured, and rolled over. With an effort Bruce relaxed his hands, arms, shoulders, head, feet. He let himself sink. He tried to concentrate on his breathing, but his father rolled over on his back again and once more the snoring burst out and died and whiffled and sawed and snorted.

By now, he had resolution in him, or around him, rigid as iron. Tomorrow, for sure, for good, he would break out of this catalepsy. He would go and see Joe. Joe would lend him enough to get him to Minneapolis. Not another day in this hateful city. Not another night in this room.

He yawned, surprising himself. It must be late, two o’clock at least. He ought to get to sleep. But he lay uneasily, his mind tainted with hatred as the air was tainted with perfume. He tried cunningly to elude his mind and go to sleep before it could notice, but no matter how he composed himself for blackness and shut his eyes and breathed regularly, that awareness inside was
out again in a half minute, lively as a weasel, and he was helplessly hunted again from hiding place to hiding place.

Eventually he fell back upon an old device.

He went into a big dark room in his mind, a room shadowy with half-seen tables. He groped and found a string above him and pulled, and light fell suddenly in a bright cone from the darker cone of the shade. Below the light lay an expanse of dark green cloth, and this was the only lighted thing in all that darkness. Carefully he gathered bright balls into a wooden triangle, pushing them forward until the apex lay over a round spot on the cloth. Quietly and thoroughly he chalked a cue; the inlaid handle and smooth taper of the shaft were very real to his eyes and hands. He lined up the cue ball, aimed, drew the cue back and forth over the bridge of his left hand. He saw the balls run from the spinning shock of the break, and carom, and come to rest, and he hunted up the yellow One ball and got a shot at it between two others. He had to cut it very fine, but he saw the shot go true, the One angle off cleanly into the side pocket. He saw the cue ball rebound and kiss and stop, and he shot the Two in a straight shot for the left corner pocket, putting drawers on the cue ball to get shape for the Three.