Recapitulation (35 page)

Yellow and blue and red, spotted and striped, he shot pool balls into pockets as deep and black and silent as the cellars of his consciousness. He was not now quarry that his mind chased, but an actor, a doer, a willer, a man in command. By an act of will or of flight he focused his whole awareness on the game he played. His mind undertook it with intense concentration. He took pride in little two-cushion banks, little triumphs of accuracy, small successes of foresight. When he had finished one game and the green cloth was bare, he dug the balls from the bin under the end of the table and racked them up and began another.

Eventually, he knew, nothing would remain in his mind but the clean green cloth traced with running color and bounded by simple problems, and sometime in the middle of an intricately planned combination shot he would pale off into sleep.

At noon, after the rain, the sun seemed very bright. It poured down from a clearing sky, glittered on wet roofs, gleamed in
reflection from pavements and sidewalks. On the peaks east of the city there was a purity of snow.

Coming down the hill Bruce noticed the excessive brightness and could not tell whether it was really as it seemed, or whether his plunge out of the dark isolated hole of his life had restored a lost capacity to see. A slavery or a paralysis was ended. He had been for three hours in the company of the best friend whom for weeks he had been avoiding. He had been eyed with concern, he had been warmed by solicitude and generosity. In his pocket he had fifty dollars, enough to get him to Minneapolis, where he could renew the one unterminated possibility of his life. It seemed to him incredible that he had buried himself in dismal hotel and dreary poolroom for so long. He could not understand why he had not, long before this, moved his legs in the direction of Thirteenth East. He perceived that he had been sullen and morbid, and it occurred to him that even Schmeckebier and Edwards and the rest might have found him a difficult companion.

His father, too. The fury of the night before had gone, though he knew that he would not again bend toward sympathy. He would never think of his father without smelling that perfume. Let him have it. If that was what he wanted—after what he had had!—let him have it. They could part without an open quarrel, but without affection. They would part right now, within an hour.

From the alley where he parked, two grimy stairways led down into the cellars. One went to the furnace room, the other to the pool hall. The iron railings were blockaded with ash cans. Descent into Avernus. He went down the left-hand stair.

The door was locked. He knocked, and after some time knocked again. Finally someone pulled on the door from inside. It stuck, and was yanked irritably inward. His father stood there in shirt sleeves, a cigar in his mouth.

“Oh,” he said. “I was wondering what had become of you.”

The basement air was foul and heavy, dense with the reek from the toilet. Bruce saw as he stepped inside that at the front end only the night light behind the bar was on, but that light was coming from Schmeckebier’s door at this end, too, the two weak illuminations diffusing in the shadowy room, leaving the middle in almost absolute darkness. It was the appropriate time, the proper place. The stink of the prison was persuasively concentrated.
He drew his lungs full with a kind of passion, and said, “I just came down to …”

“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier called out. He came to his door, wrapped to the armpits in a bar apron, with a spoon in his hand, and he bent, peering out into the gloom like a disturbed dwarf from an underhill cave. “Harry? Who? Oh, Bwuce. Shust in time, shust in time. It is not long now.” His lower lip waggled, and he sucked it up.

“What’s not long?” Bruce said.

“Vot?” Schmeckebier said, and thrust out his big head. “You forgot about it?”

“I must have. What?”

“The duck feed,” his father said impatiently.

They stood staring at one another in the dusk. The right moment was gone. With a twitch of the shoulder Bruce let it go. He would wait a while, pick his time. Schmeckebier went back inside, and as he walked past the door Bruce saw through the doorway the lumpy bed, the big chair with a blanket spread over it, the rolltop desk littered with pots and pans, the green and white enamel of the range. The rich smell of roasting came out and mingled oddly with the chemical stink of toilet disinfectant.

“Are we going to eat in there?”

His father snorted. “How could we eat in there? Old Maxie lived in the ghetto too damn long. My God, I never saw such a boar’s nest.”

“Vot’s duh matter? Vot’s duh matter?” Schmeckebier said. With his lip jutting, he stooped to look into the oven, and Harry Mason went shaking his head up between the tables to the counter. Bruce, following him, saw the three places set up on the bar, the three glasses of tomato juice, the platter of olives and celery. His father reached with a shaker and shook a little salt into each glass of tomato juice.

“All the fixings. Soon as Max gets those birds out of the oven we can take her on.”

Now it would be easy to say, “As soon as we eat I’ll be shoving off.” He opened his mouth to say it, but was interrupted again, this time by a light tapping on the glass door beyond Sciutti’s shop. He swung around and saw duskily beyond the glass the smooth blond hair, the even smile.

“It’s Billy,” he said. “Shall I let him in?”

“Sure,” his father said. “Tell him to come in and have a duck with us.”

But Billy Hammond shook his head, was shaking his head as he came through the door. “No, thanks, I just ate. I’m full of chow mein. This is a family dinner, anyway. You go on ahead.”

“Got plenty,” Harry Mason said, and made a motion to set up another plate.

“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier bawled from the back. “Who come in? Is dot Billy Hammond? Set him up a blate.”

“By God, his nose sticks as far into things as his lip,” Harry Mason said. Still holding the plate, he roared back, “Catch up with the parade, for Christ sake, or else tend to your cooking.” Chuckling, he worked his eyebrows at Bruce and Billy.

Schmeckebier had disappeared, but now his squat figure blotted the doorway again. “Vot? Vot you say?”

“Vot?” Mason said. “Vot? Vot? Vot? Vot does it matter vot I said? Get the hell back to your kitchen.”

He was in a high humor. The effect of last night must still be with him. He was still playing Mine Jovial Host. He looked at the two of them and laughed so naturally that Bruce almost joined him. “I think old Maxie’s head is full of duck dressing,” he said, leaning on the counter. “I ever tell you about the time we came back from Reno together? We stopped off in the desert to look at a mine, and got lost on a little dirt road, so we had to camp. I was trying to figure out where we were, and started looking for stars, but it was clouded over, hard to locate anything. So I ask old Maxie if he can see the Big Dipper anywhere. He thinks about that for maybe ten minutes with his lip stuck out and then he says, ‘I t’ink it’s in duh vater bucket.’ ”

He did the grating gutturals of Schmeckebier’s speech so accurately that Bruce smiled in spite of himself. The old man made another motion with the plate toward Billy Hammond. “Better sit down and have one with us.”

“Thanks,” Billy said. His eyes had the ingenuous liquid softness of a young girl’s. “Thanks, I really did just eat. You go on, I’ll shoot a little pool if it’s all right.”

Now came Schmeckebier with a big platter held in both hands. He bore it smoking through the gloom of the pool hall and up the steps to the counter, and Harry Mason took it from
him there and with a flourish speared one after another three tight-skinned brown ducks and slid them onto the plates set side by side for the feast. The one frugal light from the backbar shone on them as they sat down. Bruce looked over his shoulder to see Billy Hammond pull the cord and flood a table with a sharp-edged cone of brilliance. Deliberately, already absorbed, he chalked a cue. His lips pursed, and he whistled, and whistling, bent to take aim.

Lined up in a row, they were not placed for conversation, but Harry Mason kept attempting it, leaning forward over his plate to speak to Schmeckebier or Bruce. He filled his mouth with duck and dressing and chewed, shaking his head with pleasure, and snapped off a bite of celery with a crack like a breaking stick. When his mouth was clear he said to Schmeckebier, “Ah, das schmecht gut, hey, Maxie?”

“Ja,” Schmeckebier said, and sucked grease off his lip, and only then turned in surprise. “Say, you speak German?”

“Sure I speak German,” Mason said. “I worked three weeks once with an old squarehead brickmason that taught me the whole language. He taught me about
sehr gut
and
nicht wahr
and
besser I bleiben right hier
, and he always had his
Frau
make me up a lunch full of
kalter Aufschnitt
and
gemixte Pickeln.
I know all about German.”

Schmeckebier stared, grunted, and went back to his eating. He had already stripped the meat from the bones and was gnawing on the carcass.

“Anyway,” Mason said, “es schmecht goddamn good.” He got up and went around the counter and drew a mug of coffee from the urn. “Bruce?”

“Please.”

His father drew another. “Max?”

Schmeckebier shook his head, his mouth too full for talk. For a second or two, after he had set out two little jugs of cream, Mason stood watching Billy Hammond as he moved quietly around the one lighted table, whistling. “Look at that sucker. I bet he doesn’t even know where he is.”

By the time he got back around to his stool, he had returned to German.
“Schmeckebier,”
he said. “What’s that mean?”

“Uh?”

“What’s your name mean? Tastes beer? Likes beer?”

Schmeckebier rolled his shoulders and shook his head. The sounds he made eating were like sounds from a sty. Bruce was half sickened, sitting next to him. He wished the old man would let the conversation drop, but apparently a feast called for chatter.

“That’s a hell of a name, you know it?” he said, and already he was up and around the end of the counter again. “You couldn’t get into any church with a handle like that.” His eyes fastened on the big drooping greasy lip, and he grinned. “Schmeckeduck, that ought to be your name. ‘What’s German for duck? Vogel? Old Maxie Schmeckevogel. How about number two?”

Schmeckebier shoved his plate forward, and Mason forked out a duck from the steam table. He waited with his eyebrows lifted, and then forked out another. Bruce did not take a second.

“You better have another,” his father said, “You don’t get grub like this every day.”

“One’s my limit.”

Mason came back around. For a while they worked on their plates. Back of him Bruce heard the clack of balls hitting, and a moment later the rumble as one rolled down the chute from a pocket. The thin abstracted whistling of Billy Hammond broke off, became words.

“Talk about one being your limit,” his father said. “When we lived in Dakota we used to put on some feeds that were feeds. You remember anything about Dakota at all?”

“No.”

He was irritated at being dragged into his father’s reminiscences. He did not want to hear how many ducks the town hog could eat at a sitting.

“We’d go out, a whole bunch of us,” his father said. “The sloughs and the river were black with ducks in those days. We’d come back with a buggyful, and the women folks’d really put us
on a feed. Fifteen, twenty, thirty people. Take a hundred ducks to fill ’em up.”

He was silent for a moment, staring across the counter, thoughtfully chewing. Bruce noticed that he had tacked two wings of a teal up on the frame of the backbar mirror—small, strong bows with a band of bright blue half hidden in them. The old man’s eyes slanted sideward and caught Bruce looking at the wings.

“Doesn’t seem as if we’d had a duck feed since we left there,” he said. His forehead wrinkled, he rubbed the back of his neck. Meeting Bruce’s eyes in the backbar mirror, he spoke to the mirror, ignoring the gobbling image of Schmeckebier between his own reflection and Bruce’s.

“You remember that set of china your mother used to have? The one she painted herself? Just the plain white china with one design on each plate?”

Bruce sat stiffly, outraged that his mother should even be mentioned in this murky hole—and after last night. Gabble, gabble, gabble, he said to himself. If you can’t think of anything else to gabble about, gabble about her. Drag her through the poolroom, too. Aloud he said, “No, I guess I don’t.”

“Blue-wing teal,” his father said, and nodded at the wings tacked to the mirror frame. “Just the wings, like that. Awful pretty. She thought a teal was about the prettiest little duck there was.”

His vaguely rubbing hand came around from the back of his neck and rubbed along the cheek, pulling the slack flesh tight and distorting the mouth. Bruce said nothing, watching the pouched hound eyes in the mirror.

It was a cold, skin-tightening shock to realize that the hound eyes were cloudy with tears. The rubbing hand went over them, shading them like a hatbrim, but the mouth below remained distorted.

With a plunging movement his father was off the stool. “Oh, God damn!” he said in a strangling voice, and went past Bruce on hard heavy feet, down the three steps and past Billy Hammond, who neither looked up nor broke his sad thin whistling. Schmeckebier had swung around. “Vot’s duh matter? Now vot’s duh matter?”

Bruce turned away from him, staring after his father down the dark pool hall. Orderly things were breaking and flying apart in his mind. He had a moment of blind white terror that this whole scene whose reality stared and glittered was no more than a dream, a reflection from some dark mirror. Centered in that mirror was the look his father had thrown at him, or at the glass, just before he ran.

The hell with you, that look had said. The hell with you, Schmeckebier, and you, my son Bruce. The hell with your ignorance, whether you’re stupid or whether you just don’t know all you think you know. You don’t know enough to kick dirt down a hole. You know nothing at all, you know less than nothing because you know things wrong.