Short Stories: Five Decades (18 page)

“The kid!” Arline cried defiantly. “I take very good care of the kid. I have to stay in every night minding the kid while you are busy storing up your energy.” The phrase enraged her and she stood up, waving her arms. “What a business! You fight thirty minutes a month, you got to sleep three hundred and fifty hours. Why, it’s laughable. It is very laughable! You are some fighter!” She shook her fist at him in derision. “With all the energy you store up you ought to be able to beat the German army!”

“That is the business I am in,” Eddie tried to explain gently. “That is the nature of my profession.”

“Don’t tell me that!” Arline said. “I have gone out with other fighters. They don’t sleep all the time.”

“I am not interested,” Eddie said. “I do not want to hear anything about your life before our marriage.”

“They go to night clubs,” Arline went on irresistibly, “and they dance and they take a drink once in a while and they take a girl to see a musical show!”

Eddie nodded. “They are after something,” he said. “That is the whole story.”

“I wish to God you were after something!”

“I meet the type of fighter you mention, too,” Eddie said. “The night-club boys. They knock my head off for three rounds and then they start breathing through the mouth. By the time they reach the eighth round they wish they never saw a naked lady on a dance floor. And by the time I get through with them they are storing up energy, flat on their backs. With five thousand people watching them. You want me to be that kind of a fighter?”

“You’re wonderful,” Arline said, wrinkling her nose, sneering. “My Joe Louis. Big-Purse Eddie Megaffin. I don’t notice you bringing back the million-dollar gate.”

“I am progressing slowly,” Eddie said, looking at the picture of Mary and Jesus over his bed. “I am planning for the future.”

“I am linked for life to a goddamn health-enthusiast,” Arline said despairingly.

“Why do you talk like that, Arline?”

“Because I want to be in Kansas City,” she wailed.

“Explain to me,” Eddie said, “why in the name of God you are so crazy for Kansas City?”

“I’m lonesome,” Arline wept with true bitterness. “I’m awful lonesome. I’m only twenty-one years old, Eddie.”

Eddie patted her gently on the shoulder. “Look, Arline.” He tried to make his voice very warm and at the same time logical. “If you would only go easy. If you would go by coach and not buy presents for everybody, maybe I can borrow a coupla bucks and swing it.”

“I would rather die,” Arline said. “I would rather never see Kansas City again for the rest of my life than let them know my husband has to watch pennies like a streetcar conductor. A man with his name in the papers every week. It would be shameful!”

“But, Arline, darling”—Eddie’s face was tortured—“you go four times a year, you spread presents like the WPA and you always buy new clothes …”

“I can’t appear in Kansas City in rags!” Arline pulled at a stocking, righting it on her well-curved leg. “I would rather …”

“Some day, darling,” Eddie interrupted. “We’re working up. Right now I can’t.”

“You can!” Arline said. “You’re lying to me, Eddie Megaffin. Jake Blucher called up this morning and he told me he offered you a thousand dollars to fight Joe Principe.”

Eddie sat down in a chair. He looked down at the floor, understanding why Arline had picked this particular afternoon.

“You would come out of that fight with seven hundred and fifty dollars.” Arline’s voice was soft and inviting. “I could go to Kansas …”

“Joe Principe will knock my ears off.”

Arline sighed. “I am so anxious to see my mother. She is an old woman and soon she will die.”

“At this stage,” Eddie said slowly, “I am not ready for Joe Principe. He is too strong and too smart for me.”

“Jake Blucher told me he thought you had a wonderful chance.”

“I have a wonderful chance to land in the hospital,” Eddie said. “That Joe Principe is made out of springs and cement. If you gave him a pair of horns it would be legal to kill him with a sword.”

“He is only a man with two fists just like you,” Arline said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re always telling me how good you are.”

“In two years,” Eddie said, “taking it very easy and careful, making sure I don’t get knocked apart …”

“You could make the money easy!” Arline pointed her finger dramatically at him. “You just don’t want to. You don’t want me to be happy. I see through you, Eddie Megaffin!”

“I just don’t want to get beaten up,” Eddie said, shaking his head.

“A fine fighter!” Arline laughed. “What kind of fighter are you, anyhow? A fighter is supposed to get beaten up, isn’t he? That’s his business, isn’t it? You don’t care for me. All you wanted was somebody to give you a kid and cook your goddamn steaks and lamb chops. In Brooklyn! I got to stay in a lousy little house day in and …”

“I’ll take you to the movies tonight,” Eddie promised.

“I don’t want to go to the movies. I want to go to Kansas City.” Arline threw herself face down on the bed and sobbed. “I’m caught. I’m caught! You don’t love me! You won’t let me go to people who love me! Mama! Mama!”

Eddie closed his eyes in pain. “I love you,” he said, meaning it. “I swear to God.”

“You say it.” Her voice was smothered in the pillow. “But you don’t prove it! Prove it! I never knew a young man could be so stingy. Prove it …” The words trailed off in sorrow.

Eddie went over an bent down to kiss her. She shook her shoulders to send him away and cried like a heartbroken child. From the next room, where the baby had been sleeping, came the sound of his wailing.

Eddie walked over to the window and looked out at the peaceful Brooklyn Street, at the trees and the little boys and girls skating.

“O.K.,” he said, “I’ll call Blucher.”

Arline stopped crying. The baby still wailed in the next room.

“I’ll try to raise him to twelve hundred,” Eddie said. “You can go to Kansas City. You happy?”

Arline sat up and nodded. “I’ll write Mama right away,” she said.

“Take the kid out for a walk, will you?” Eddie said, as Arline started repairing her face before the mirror. “I want to take a little nap.”

“Sure,” Arline said, “sure, Eddie.”

Eddie took off his shoes and lay down on the bed to start storing up his energy.

Triumph of Justice

M
ike Pilato purposefully threw open the door of Victor’s shack. Above him the sign that said, “Lunch, Truckmen Welcome,” shook a little, and the pale shadows its red bulbs threw in the twilight waved over the State Road.

“Victor,” Mike said, in Italian.

Victor was leaning on the counter, reading Walter Winchell in a spread-out newspaper. He smiled amiably. “Mike,” he said, “I am so glad to see you.”

Mike slammed the door. “Three hundred dollars, Victor,” he said, standing five feet tall, round and solid as a pumpkin against the door. “You owe me three hundred dollars, Victor, and I am here tonight to collect.”

Victor shrugged slightly and closed the paper on Walter Winchell.

“As I’ve been telling you for the past six months,” he said, “business is bad. Business is terrible. I work and I work and at the end …” He shrugged again. “Barely enough to feed myself.”

Mike’s cheeks, farmer-brown, and wrinkled deeply by wind and sun, grew dark with blood. “Victor, you are lying in my face,” he said slowly, his voice desperately even. “For six months, each time it comes time to collect the rent you tell me, ‘Business is bad.’ What do I say? I say ‘All right, Victor, don’t worry, I know how it is.’”

“Frankly, Mike,” Victor said sadly, “there has been no improvement this month.”

Mike’s face grew darker than ever. He pulled harshly at the ends of his iron-gray mustache, his great hands tense and swollen with anger, repressed but terrible. “For six months, Victor,” Mike said, “I believed you. Now I no longer believe you.”

“Mike,” Victor said reproachfully.

“My friends, my relatives,” Mike said, “they prove it to me. Your business is wonderful, ten cars an hour stop at your door; you sell cigarettes to every farmer between here and Chicago; on your slot machine alone …” Mike waved a short thick arm at the machine standing invitingly against a wall, its wheels stopped at two cherries and a lemon. Mike swallowed hard, stood breathing heavily, his deep chest rising and falling sharply against his sheepskin coat. “Three hundred dollars!” he shouted. “Six months at fifty dollars! I built this shack with my own hands for you, Victor. I didn’t know what kind of a man you were. You were an Italian, I trusted you! Three hundred dollars or get out tomorrow! Finish! That’s my last word.”

Victor smoothed his newspaper down delicately on the counter, his hands making a dry brushing sound in the empty lunchroom. “You misunderstand,” he said gently.

“I misunderstand nothing!” Mike yelled. “You are on my land in my shack and you owe me three hundred dollars …”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Victor said, looking coldly at Mike. “That is what you misunderstand. I have paid you every month, the first day of the month, fifty dollars.”

“Victor!” Mike whispered, his hands dropping to his sides. “Victor, what are you saying …?”

“I have paid the rent. Please do not bother me any more.” Calmly Victor turned his back on Mike and turned two handles on the coffee urn. Steam, in a thin little plume, hissed up for a moment.

Mike looked at Victor’s narrow back, with the shoulder blades jutting far out, making limp wings in the white shirt. There was finality in Victor’s pose, boredom, easy certainty. Mike shook his head slowly, pulling hard at his mustache. “My wife,” Mike said, to the disdainful back, “she told me not to trust you. My wife knew what she was talking about, Victor.” Then, with a last flare of hope, “Victor, do you really mean it when you said you paid me?”

Victor didn’t turn around. He flipped another knob on the coffee urn. “I mean it.”

Mike lifted his arm, as though to say something, pronounce warning. Then he let it drop and walked out of the shack, leaving the door open. Victor came out from behind the counter, looked at Mike moving off with his little rolling limp down the road and across the cornfield. Victor smiled and closed the door and went back and opened the paper to Walter Winchell.

Mike walked slowly among the cornstalks, his feet crunching unevenly in the October earth. Absently he pulled at his mustache. Dolores, his wife, would have a thing or two to say. “No,” she had warned him, “do not build a shack for him. Do not permit him onto your land. He travels with bad men; it will turn out badly. I warn you!” Mike was sure she would not forget this conversation and would repeat it to him word for word when he got home. He limped along unhappily. Farming was better than being a landlord. You put seed into the earth and you knew what was coming out. Corn grew from corn, and the duplicity of Nature was expected and natural. Also no documents were signed in the compact with Nature, no leases and agreements necessary, a man was not at a disadvantage if he couldn’t read or write. Mike opened the door to his house and sat down heavily in the parlor, without taking his hat off. Rosa came and jumped on his lap, yelling, “Poppa, Poppa, tonight I want to go to the movies, Poppa, take me to the movies!”

Mike pushed her off. “No movies,” he said harshly. Rosa stood in a corner and watched him reproachfully.

The door from the kitchen opened and Mike sighed as he saw his wife coming in, wiping her hands on her apron. She stood in front of Mike, round, short, solid as a plow horse, canny, difficult to deceive.

“Why’re you sitting in the parlor?” she asked.

“I feel like sitting in the parlor,” Mike said.

“Every night you sit in the kitchen,” Dolores said. “Suddenly you change.”

“I’ve decided,” Mike said loudly, “that it’s about time I made some use of this furniture. After all, I paid for it, I might as well sit in it before I die.”

“I know why you’re sitting in the parlor,” Dolores said.

“Good! You know!”

“You didn’t get the money from Victor,” Dolores wiped the last bit of batter from her hands. “It’s as plain as the shoes on your feet.”

“I smell something burning,” Mike said.

“Nothing is burning. Am I right or wrong?” Dolores sat in the upright chair opposite Mike. She sat straight, her hands neatly in her lap, her head forward and cocked a little to one side, her eyes staring directly and accusingly into his. “Yes or no?”

“Please attend to your own department,” Mike said miserably. “I do the farming and attend to the business details.”

“Huh!” Dolores said disdainfully.

“Are you starving?” Mike shouted. “Answer me, are you starving?”

Rosa started to cry because her father was shouting.

“Please, for the love of Jesus,” Mike screamed at her, “don’t cry!”

Dolores enfolded Rosa in her arms.… “Baby, baby,” she crooned, “I will not let him harm you.”

“Who offered to harm her?” Mike screamed, banging on a table with his fist like a mallet. “Don’t lie to her!”

Dolores kissed the top of Rosa’s head soothingly. “There, there,” she crooned. “There.” She looked coldly at Mike. “Well. So he didn’t pay.”