The Fires of Spring (22 page)

With a tremendous effort David drove his fist in the Sheik’s windpipe, so that the man’s monstrous tongue protruded and he had to drop the boy. “Acchhh,” he groaned, trying to get air, and when he did so, he lunged bear-like at his enemy, crying, “I smash you plenty!” His foot slipped, and his right leg tore away a large portion of canvas. Seeing this, David leaped for the door, but the strong man reached out and grabbed his ankle. David collapsed into a painful heap and the brute leaped upon him. Grunting and sweating, the big moron began to hammer David about the face and shoulders. The boy’s energy was almost gone, but in the distance he heard shouts of men dashing through the runways of the canal. They were yelling instructions at one another, and someone fired off a revolver.

“I’ve got to stop him!” David grunted. “Sheik! Sheik!” he pleaded. “If they see you …” A monstrous fist hammered into his mouth, and things grew dark. With a last effort, David doubled his knees once more and tried to kick the ape-man loose. He could not, and the fist fell again. There was another pistol shot, and the voices were near. With almost superhuman effort, the boy shot his knees out and the tired moron spun across the floor and through the torn canvas into the canal.

A gondola came by and the occupants screamed at the sight of the Sheik’s bleeding face peering at them from the dark waters. Their cries were doubled when he made weird, gurgling sounds at them. Then the workmen from the Canals rushed up and cried, “There he is! Shoot him in the legs!” Like a monster from Greek mythology the Sheik rose from the waters with green slime about him. A workman had a heavy club which he shied across the canal and at the moron’s head. “Accchhh!” the wounded man grunted, and for a moment it seemed that he had been killed. But soon he rose farther downstream, and a young boy began clubbing him in the face. Like a wounded otter, the great hulk beat his way to safety.

“Come over here!” the Canal manager shouted. Obediently the moron pawed his way to shore, like a dog. “What were you doing?” the manager asked.

“I ’sn’t doin’ nothin’,” the exhausted fool replied.

“He had too much whiskey,” David said quickly. The
manager looked suspiciously at David and then at the panting Sheik, who mouthed a confession of being drunk.

“You’ll have to pay ten dollars for that damage,” the manager said, and the Sheik mumbled a series of inchoate vowels. The workmen led their giant charge back to his heavy job of hauling gondolas. David watched them go and wondered both at them and at himself. They knew what the Sheik had been doing, and they recognized how dangerous he was; but they also knew that if he were fired they would have to do his ugly work. It seemed that every job David knew of was like this one: certain men took it easy and stole from others, while way down in the caverns monsters and fools and the dispossessed labored in bitter sweat.

And then he thought of another person he had known in the cavern, frail Nora who had worked for Max Volo, and he dashed out into the sunlight of Paradise to look for her. He found her by a rootbeer stand. “Cripes!” she whimpered. “Your face looks awful.”

“Nothing broken,” David assured her.

“You shouldn’t of hit him,” the thin girl said, wiping David’s lips.

“To think of him spying there!” David blustered.

“You’re one to talk!” Nora chided. “Didn’t you spy into Max’s room? Huh?”

David gave the best excuse in the world for anything: “That was different. I had reasons.” He wanted to tell her that the idea of anyone’s looking at her or touching her infuriated him, but even then he did not comprehend how love can transform any man into an automatic creature. It took the Hurricane to teach him that.

Shortly before Nora was to leave for Denver, Klementi Kol arranged a dinner for the young lovers. Miss Meigs was there, but not Mr. Stone. That austere man had primly refused to share a meal with a “rotten little baggage.”

The dinner was excellent, and Nora acquitted herself decently. David had coached her on what he had learned of table manners, and she sat very straight and kept her elbows on her lap. When Kol asked David what he would like to hear as an encore, David replied, “The Grand March from
Aïda
.” Then Kol asked Nora, and she grinned happily, saying, “What’s good enough for Dave is good enough for me!”

At the concert she sat in the front row and between numbers
kept up a merry chatter which David found better than the music. She thought that Miss Meigs was quite a singer. “She sure makes eyes at Mr. Kol! Her dress must cost a fortune. Do you suppose she’s in love with Mr. Kol? That guy who blows the big thing is sure giving her the eye!” She clutched David’s arm warmly and whispered, “Who’d ever thought such people would ask me to dinner?”

When the last cymbals crashed, the young lovers went backstage to thank Mr. Kol and to congratulate Miss Meigs. “It was a swell concert,” David admitted. “About the best. Now you’ll have to excuse me, since I’ve got to get back to work.” He led Nora off past the lake, and when she saw the Hurricane she said, “Say, how’s about a ride? One quick one?”

“I can’t do it,” David protested. “My relief’ll raise the devil as is.” He refused to go, but when Nora pouted he gave her the money, and she smiled so winsomely that he wanted to kiss her then, but people were watching. She was very proper and lovely as she walked to the booth. From a distance David saw her slide past Mr. Stone without his ever looking up. “I’m glad of that!” he sighed.

He watched her board a car and start the long climb up the incline. He shot a kiss at her and then started to run back to Venice. But he had taken only a few steps when he heard wild screams. There was a crashing sound as the topmost railing ripped loose, and then came the long night wail of another car riding to death.

He stopped rigidly and prayed: “Oh, God! Don’t let it be Nora!” But it was Nora! He knew it, and he started to run toward the lilac trees. Ahead of him others ran, and by the time he got to the crashed cars, men were already throwing coats upon the dead bodies.

“Was there a single girl?” he shouted.

“All sorts of people,” a man replied.

“Where?” David screamed, running from body to body. As always, most of the victims were young. He looked in horror at five of them. Nora was not there, but other bodies had been thrown beyond the lilacs. He scrambled across a ditch and searched among the ruins. A boy held the head of another boy.

“Get a doctor, mister!” the first boy cried. “He ain’t dead.”

“Was there a single girl?” he shouted.

“Me? I wouldn’t know. Catch me in one of them death traps?” the boy asked. “I work here!”

David looked at the remaining bodies. Still there was no Nora, and for a moment he believed that his prayer had been answered. Then he saw still a third group of people, and he became pale. Even his hands blanched and he climbed back across the ditch. He was reaching down to pull away a coat when he saw Nora standing at the edge of the crowd.

“David!” she cried. He leaped across the body and grasped her hands. “Was I ever scared?” she asked. “I was in the next car.”

Trembling, he led her from the crowds. When they were alone she confided, “I could see them all the way down to earth. The cars were running too close. They make more money that way. It went off not twenty feet from us. David! We just scraped by.” Above them the lights went out. No more that year would the Hurricane roar.

“Nora,” David finally said, “I thought my heart would never beat again. It isn’t only because … I mean, in the palace …” He could find no words. He held her closely and smelled the heavy perfume in her hair. “But if I thought we’d never …” Again the right words could not come and he took refuge in the simplest idea he could command: “I was so lonely until this summer.”

They walked a long time, and he took no thought of his job, nor of the people about him, nor of anything. By the lake he met Klementi Kol and the singer. He rushed up to them crying: “I thought she was on the Hurricane, but she wasn’t. She was, of course, but she wasn’t on that car. She’s all right!”

All the way home on the trolley he thought of the strange passion that had possessed him when he believed Nora to be dead. It was like nothing he knew, not even like the fragile moments when he lay deep upon her. It was wrenching and terrible, that passion. He had to acknowledge that one day Nora would be dead. He even suspected that sending her to Denver was not much good; yet he could still reason that the day of death was in the future. But tonight! That had been now! This day! This moment of time, and after it was gone he would never see her again nor feel her soft body nor hear her whisper: “Now you get some sleep, Dave.”

He wondered how men could live till they were seventy if they endured such passions as he had known that fifteenth summer, and although he knew many things, and although he tossed on his poorhouse bed all night, he did not even guess that men are able to live because slowly, one by one, they
snuff out the fires of spring until only embers burn in white dignity, in loneliness, and often in cold despair.

Paradise closed and Nora went to Denver. Almost as if his own good common sense had dictated it, David plunged into the boy’s world of high-school politics and basketball. This was his sixteenth winter, and he was becoming a wiry fellow. Away from the Park he was a boy again, and he alternately rode the crests of fortune when his team won, or wallowed in the troughs of dismay when they lost. Especially in games away from home he was prone to go wild with excitement and want to fight the entire crowd. He played at his best then and on the way home Bobby Creighton would sit beside him and say, “All right now, Dave. Cool down. You’ve got to learn to master yourself if you want to be a star.” Bobby spoke to him as if he were a fledgling boy and David looked forward to being with the coach.

Sometimes after practice Bobby would hold Dave and Harry Moomaugh back. “You’re my two sleeping tablets,” he’d joke, but they knew what he meant. Doylestown forged ahead in the race and maintained a substantial lead. “Dave,” he argued one night, holding David’s shoulder as if he were still a kid in grammar school, “tomorrow night I want you to drive for the basket like you never did before. Because if you can ring up three baskets in the first quarter …”

The stratagems of basketball quite took David’s mind off the murky summer and he became a healthy young animal replenishing itself at the springs of strength. For every evil trick Max Volo had taught him, Bobby Creighton taught him one of the American virtues. “No matter if they knee your crotch loose, my team don’t play dirty!” Bobby shouted at his center when the big man kneed an opponent. For every snide approach to life that Mr. Stone inculcated in the boy, Bobby Creighton taught him the fundamental optimism that governs most American thinking. “Unless your arm is cut off above the elbow, I want to see you keep fightin’. I want it said everywhere in Pennsylvania: A Doylestown team don’t quit.” And to the murky Coal Mine, or the forbidden palaces of Venice, Bobby opposed an attitude toward girls that was almost sacrosanct. “A man who will defile the name of a girl,” he said with deep seriousness, “well, he’d quit or do anything.” It was an open-and-shut world that Bobby preached, a world in which goodness reigned, strong men were clean, and Doylestown won more than half its games.

David had almost forgotten Nora when her postcard arrived from Denver. It showed a picture of the mountains and bore only three words: “Some place Nora.”

The message reached him after an exhilarating victory over Souderton and he was about to crush the card into his pocket when he looked at it again, and he forgot the game and began to wonder where the thin girl was. He read the message at least fifty times, but he could not even determine whether Nora’s reaction to Denver was delight or disgust. “Some place!” Poignantly, he wished he were with Nora. He thought of Max’s suggestion: “Take a job in my theatre. You could have a nest somewheres with the girl.” The vision of such a place came to him. Nora waited for him and when they went to bed she curled up inside his arms and legs. He closed his eyes and thought of her warm body, and like fire in a country barn he flamed into wanting her. But the next day Bobby Creighton had a bright idea about stopping Perkasie, and he said, “Dave? Do you think you’re man enough to count three before you shoot your long ones?”

David said he thought he could, but in the game he trembled like a child, and tossed the ball quickly toward the basket as he had always done. At intermission Bobby looked at him with disgust and said, “You make a lot of promises, kid.”

“I get excited,” David explained.

“Sure you do!” Bobby stormed. “Everyone does. But a real ball player learns. Now are you a man or just a kid?”

In the second half David proved he was fifty-fifty. He couldn’t count to three, but he did get up to two. Creighton said, “That’s better!” and David said, “Those guards look so damned big …” Bobby stopped him short. “Who gave you permission to say
damn
?” he asked. “Apologize!” David blushed and said he was sorry. “You better be!” Bobby said. “If you’re so eager to grow up, do it on the floor. Stick your face right in the guard’s and outwait him. But don’t try to be a man by sayin’ tough words. It don’t fit you!”

There was another aspect of basketball that made David feel he was still a boy. After the games, and the drinks at the soda fountain, and the recounted glories, David drove back to the poorhouse in some car. The young drivers loved to whirl around the circle and deposit him before the men’s building. Then gears would grind and the car would spurt off through the night. A window would rise, Toothless Tom’s, and David would look up to his ultimate audience. If his team
had won, he would raise his thumb, and he would hear Tom cry along the hall: “We win! We win!” But if Doylestown had lost, David would wave his hand low above the earth, like an umpire signaling safe. Then Tom would glumly report: “We lose. Tonight we lose.”

And then, no matter what the hour, when he got to Door 8 the old men of the poorhouse would troop by in the darkness to congratulate or console him. “I hear we win, Dave!” they would say. They were proud of their player, but not even their congratulations could quite equal the dumb warmth of Luther Detwiler’s comment on defeat. He always said the same thing: “You can’t win ’em all!” Then he would chuckle as if he had made a very clever remark.