"Application?"
"No," I said. "I'm just helping out during Christmas."
"You're a scab, buddy," Long-legs said. "Don't you read the papers?"
"I don't like comic strips," I said.
They sighed. I think they hated to do it, but I was bucking the system.
Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into
their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a
beating. That's one thing I knew.
Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard
noises like _make an example of him_ and _do something permanent_ and I
squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.
I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a
piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of
the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed
my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.
It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I
unscrewed my eyes.
There was a big man in a heavy wool overcoat and gray homburg spread on
a damp centerfold from the _News_. There was a pick-up slip from the
warehouse under the fingers of one hand, and somebody had beaten his
brains out.
The police figured it was part of some labor dispute, I guess, and they
never got to me.
I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't
been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see
the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for
looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling
Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had
happened that day.
* * * * *
Searching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a
strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making
the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape
and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.
There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public
library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything
to eat since the day before, it enervated me.
The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody
there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses,
and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred
matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a
few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep
from spilling more from the spoon.
I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my
fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the
dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the
wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt.
It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat,
non-objectionable bum.
The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or
hostilely sympathetic.
"I'd like to get into the stacks, miss," I said, "and see some of the
old newspapers."
"Which newspapers?" the old girl asked stiffly.
I thought back. I couldn't remember the exact date. "Ones for the first
week in November last year."
"We have the _Times_ microfilmed. I would have to project them for you."
"I didn't want to see the _Times_," I said, fast. "Don't you have any
newspapers on paper?" I didn't want her to see what I wanted to read up
on.
"We have the _News_, bound, for last year."