Driving home to St. Anthony Park, he imagined himself racing in from left field after the collision and decking the jerk with a flying tackle. Bashing his face in. Hard hammer blows to the jerk's gut, sharp jabs to the chinless face (Left! Right! Left!
Uppercutuppercutuppercut!
)âthen, as all the other jerks came lumbering drunkenly toward him, disposing of them one-two-three with lightning karate kicks, whirling, dodging their big windmill swings, kicking kneecaps (“Arrrgghhhh!”), pounding heads together, flipping the flabby hombres up high and down flat on their fat backs (“Oooofff!”), and when they wobbled back up on their flat feet and pulled out paring knives, he dispatched them with quick little jujitsu brick-breaker thrusts to the throat,
wap wap wap wap,
and they went down like pigs at Hormel: Wham! Bam! Pow! Wham! Krrack!
He coasted around Madison School and up Dowell Street. The yellow backhoe sat up on his grass, the deep trench lay along the curb. He parked in front of Spander's and jumped the trench to his yard. Two months of sewer work and still no pipe in sight. In the cool house nothing stirred except a breeze through the white curtains; the white kitchen smelled faintly of lemon. The flowers in the back garden perched on the hill in ranks, an audience, divided by rows of stones. Leonie was at her mother's, because Ethel was having her lymph nodes removed on Monday morning, or was it a gland? Mel was sick, too. Then Ed remembered the faint little peep of protest that came out of his mouth in left field, the timid ladylike petulance, the stamping of his tiny foot, when mayhem was what the situation called for, assault with a baseball bat.
Coward.
Why had he walked toward third base so slowly if not to make sure he'd get there too late?
He could recall other occasions when he had backed away from trouble. And it wasn't nonviolence, it was failures of nerve. He hadn't turned the other cheek, he had merely averted his eyes and walked away from fights. People could see this weakness in him. People were walking on him, and he would have to put a stop to it. The answer was so simple, it floated into the kitchen into plain view, like the glass of beer on the table in front of him.
Hit someone.
He'd have to go out and pop somebody to cure his cowardice. Maybe it wasn't exactly cowardice but more like an eye-hand coordination problem, that he couldn't pull the trigger on his fist. Some brain cells were flabby up in the anger circuit. Anger mounting in the brain, creating conditions likely to bring on a stroke. If he did nothing, soon his hands would shake, he'd become an old man who berates children. One good shot at a jerk would flush out the system and restore him to health.
He threw the beer down the sink and went for a walk. Down the alley behind the fine old colonial houses, past the school and the tennis courts and a little way into the park, and he stopped in a grove of poplars. How to stand to get off a good punch? Like a pitcher on the mound. Body relaxed, eyes narrowed to slivery dark slits. Step off the rubber with left foot, bring right arm forward, fist clenched. Pow! He set the next Sunday as the deadline for the punch. No. Wednesday. A real punch. No shoving, no “Oh yeah?”s and “Look out”s and nonsense like that, a straight-on assault on somebody who deserved it.
That night Leonie called. Her mother was in a panic about the operation. Ed could hear weeping in the background. Leonie was worn out. “How's your dad?” he asked. “Useless,” she said. Monday morning, he had two chances. The bus driver told him in a brusque tone of voice to step to the rear, and briefly Ed considered letting him have it, but then the guy said it to the next person, too. Ed got off downtown, crossed the street, and a vicious punk in a beat-up tan station wagon swerved right into the crosswalk, honked, gave him the finger, zoomed away. Ed yelled “Hey! You!” and ran a couple steps after the car as if he might chase it to the next stoplight, rip the door open, haul the kid out, and beat the buttons off him, but the next intersection was a long way off and the light there was green. The kid sailed on. Ed went to work. “Today's the day,” he said. “Your time is coming.” Several times that day he said, “Be ready. It'll come. Don't let it pass.” He heard his boss talking to secretaries in his fruity, pompous voice, and Ed strained to pick up some blatant sexist remark that might warrant a good pop in the snoot but heard none. Later, the clown strolled into his office wearing brilliant red-plaid pants and a lurid green bozo jacket. “How's it going, old boy?” he asked. Ed let it pass.
En route home, a marquee he never noticed before, two blocks from work: “Live Continuous Sex ON STAGE See Hear Smell Touch And Much More SPECIAL SURPRISE ACTS & Things You Thought Were Illegal GROUPS WELCOME.” He tried the door. Chained. What kind of jerk would run a slimy business like this, hanging out garbage for children to see and disturbing their delicate sense of the beauty of thingsâmaybe he could return in the evening, jump onstage, and cream the emcee, a pimply little creep in lizard pants. Wipe the smirk off his face, put a little life into his blank eyes. Get arrested, be interviewed by TV: “Why did I do it? Because I have the capability of outrage at outrageous things, that's why!”
There was some good slugging on TV that night. James Garner pasted a guy in a men's toilet and tied his ankles with his belt and hung him upside down from a stanchion. Two welterweights went the distance at the Sands, standing toe to toe and banging the sweat off each other. Even Michael Landon connected on “Little House on the Prairie,” an evil teamster who kidnapped Laura from the drygoods store. Dan Rather didn't, but he looked like he could go a couple rounds. Leonie called at 10:00. The operation was a success. Six hours. “I wish I could come home,” she said, on the verge of tears. Ed wanted to tell her: Your husband could be in jail tomorrow, or the hospital, maybe a cold marble slab, you may be talking to your Ed for the last time. Later, he gave himself a good pep talk in bed. “Your whole life is dedicated to stepping out of people's way! You're so good at it, you don't even know that you're doing it! You've got to get out there and hit! Smash 'em! Knock 'em down! Otherwise, something worse is going to happen. You turn into a shadow. A pale polite presence, a slight coolness that moves from room to room.” He lay in the dark and it seemed to him that hitting somebody was a deeply moral undertaking: horrible deeds had come of men exactly like him being afraid to duke it out who were slowly crazed by cowardice until some psychopathic official policy let them ease the strain by commanding insane acts of violence at a safe distance: tons of bombs dumped on remote villages by order of pleasant men who, if someone had shoved them on the street, would've been aghast; Indian tribes wiped out by guys afraid of Indians, who despised themselves for it and avenged this fear through brutal and dishonest documents. Paperwork! Paper that worked vicious cruelty a thousand miles away while the authors went home, kissed their wives, and bounced their babies.
Tuesday, instead of his old 6A, he took the 11A bus, which would drop him at Hell's Corners, leaving a hike of eight blocks along West 4th. It was a section of downtown known for heavy street action, a no-man's-land, people he knew told him that if you had a flat tire you should sit and wait for the cops and don't get out of your car and walk. But what those folks were afraid of was exactly what he was looking for. Little bands of minority persons lounging on the hoods of cars and yelling things at whites, insults that nice people didn't know about and couldn't always recognize. Even cabdrivers stayed away from there. He carried his Swiss army knife in his suit-coat pocket and put his medical-insurance card in his shirt pocket, where an ambulance crew could find it.
The driver of 11A was a bald little man who looked locked in position, hunched down over his big wheel, his eyes straight ahead, and when Ed asked if 11A went to West 4th, the man whispered, “Please. Not now. Please. I'm going through something now, I can't deal with this. Please.” The bus was packed full; the passengers weren't like the old 6A crowd, who sang “Happy Birthday” for the old regulars and the driver, Fred Thompson, sometimes bringing a cake. These people looked beaten down, scared, and they stared sadly into space. One man was weeping. Ed sat next to a woman in a lime-green pants suit who kept wringing her hands and humming a mournful tune. “I need to talk to someone,” she said softly after a few blocks. It was about her hair. Doctors said she was going to lose her hair. She was distraught. Ed said, “Your hair looks fine,” but in fact it did look dull and lifeless. Hell's Corners was deserted. With its cheap liquor stores, porno shops, burned-out shells of buildings boarded up, vacant lots full of trash, it looked like a street Charles Bronson would walk in his campaign against crime, but the only people Ed saw were panhandlers. Old men with the shakes saw him coming and stepped into his path and made their pitch. “I played with Bix Beiderbecke.” “I am a World War II veteran. I was wounded in North Africa.” “I'm Skeeter from the Little Rascals movies. You remember. Spanky's friend.” Ed had seen the Rascals on TV and the man actually did resemble Skeeter. Ed pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand.
Word of this gift traveled on ahead, evidently. Perhaps, as Ed continued along West 4th, Skeeter waved his arms in a signal known to all panhandlers. Ed saw people on the next block turn and look, and men stepped out of doorways, rose up from the weeds, emerged from the back seats of hulks of cars to greet him. An old woman ran across the street. “I'm dying of cancer,” she said. On the block beyond this one, ragged people stood in clumps. “I haven't eaten in three days.” “My kids are sick.” “I'm out of work. I was a teacher. I used to live in Golden Valley.” The man's front teeth were brown, rotten. “I was on the radio. I was Singin' Slim of the Bunkhouse Buddies. I have emphysema.” A man sitting against a trash barrel waved weakly and Ed leaned down. “Remember me?” the man whispered in a horrible pained voice. “Remember? You said you'd come and take me back to Fargo.”
Eight blocks, and it cost him everything in his billfold, about eighty-seven dollars. Nobody challenged him. Everyone looked like they had been banged around enough already. The fight was out of him; he knew it; he didn't try to argue with himself. That night on the “Six O'Clock Eyewitness News,” Todd Withrow led off with three harrowing stories: foster children killed in Texas when a bus skidded off the road in the rain en route to a picnic; a weak, dying child held up to the camera as her parents pleaded for a liver donor; a screaming mother held back by firemen as smoke and flames billowed up from the tiny houseâTodd's voice broke, and when Melanie came on with the weather, tears ran down her tan cheeks. “Sometimes the weather doesn't seem very important,” she whispered.
It was a week later, the Tuesday after his Wednesday deadline, when, unbelievably, he hit a man. In the men's room at a restaurant. Dinner with Leonie, home at last, Ethel and Mel having left for a week with Judy, and he ordered snails to impress her. He'd never eaten snails before. They were probably okay but he thought too much about them during the meal and retired to a cubicle for a break. Its gray steel walls were scratched with dozens of ancient messages. One said: “You Too?” Someone came in the room and sat in the next cubicle. The man blew his nose and cleared his throat. “Can I come in there with you?” he whispered.
“Beg your pardon?”
“I need to be with someone right now,” the man said. “I feelâGod, I can't tell youâI've got a wife and three kids. I love them an awful lot. Oh, Jesusâ” He started to cry. “Nobody knows what this is like. Do you have any idea? No, you don't. My God.” “I'm leaving now,” said Ed.
“Please, try to understand this. Just for one minute. Look at this.” A hairy hand passed a snapshot under the partition. Ed saw that he had a wife and three kids all right. The wife looked tired and kind and the children, in their teens, well dressed, at a confirmation perhaps. Two tall girls wore white shoes. “You're looking at one hell of a family, mister,” the man said. “So you tell meâ” Ed handed the picture back. “You must love them very much to feel so guilty about being attracted to other men,” he said. The man pounded on the steel wall and screamed, “What am I doing talking to
you
about it? You faggot!” He jumped up and yanked the door to Ed's cubicle off the hook. He was a big bald guy in a suit. Ed shoved him and the man stepped back. He swatted a rolled-up newspaper at Ed and the edge of a page scratched his left eye. A razorlike pain, tears flooding his eyes, without a single thought his right hand hauled off and slugged the man hard just above his ear. He staggered and Ed reached out to grab him, but when Ed tried to open his fist, the pain made him settle right down to his knees like a balloon descending, he knelt on the wet floor, bent over, holding the fist with his left hand. “You didn't hurt me! Just grazed me!” the man said, his speech slurred. Ed's hand was numb, getting fat. The man sat down on the sink. He said, “Gotcha pretty good, didn' I.”
Leonie paid the bill. She was amused. “Boxing? In the bathroom? Oh my.” She drove him to St. Joseph's and sat with him on the bench in the hall outside Emergency. His hand was swollen up as big as a breadloaf. “The world is full of jerks,” he said, “and ever so often you have to deal with one so the word gets around to the others and they settle down for a while.” He wasn't so sure about this, actually, but the deed was done. That part of his life was over for good and now something else could happen. He hoped the man was all right. He hoped the doctor would prescribe something strong, with codeine in it. He wished he were home in the dark.
END OF AN ERA
W
HEN LARRY ROSE DIED suddenly while cleaning out his garage one sunny day, his death came as a big shock to some people around Market Falls, Vermont, who knew him fairly well and who visited the house that evening to comfort Sarah, Larry's friend, and bring her food, including homemade rye bread, home-smoked whitefish, garbanzo salad, and a meatless lasagnaâone of Larry's favorites, though he wasn't a vegetarian (he
had
been one for a while but then he quit). They spread the dishes on a table he had made from an immense wooden spool, which stood on his new sundeck between the little yellow house and the garage, and they sat around it and talked in low voices about the man they had known, who, a few hours before, had pitched forward and fallen on the concrete floor he was sweeping. They also noticed that his table was tippy.