Though he rarely heeded its summons--cagy boy that he was--the telephone
rang oftenest for Nick. Because of the many native noises of the place,
the telephone had a special bell that was a combination buzz and ring.
It sounded above the roar of outgoing cars, the splash of the hose, the
sputter and hum of the electric battery in the rear. Nick heard it,
unheeding. A voice--Smitty's or Mike's or Elmer's--answering its call.
Then, echoing through the grey, vaulted spaces of the big garage: "Nick!
Oh, Ni-ick!"
From the other side of the great cement-floored enclosure, or in muffled
tones from beneath a car: "Whatcha want?"
"Dame on the wire."
"I ain't in."
The obliging voice again, dutifully repeating the message: "He ain't
in.... Well, it's hard to say. He might be in in a couple hours and
then again he might not be back till late. I guess he's went to Hammond
on a job----" (Warming to his task now.) "Say, won't I do?... Who's
fresh! Aw, say, _lady_!"
You'd think, after repeated rebuffs of this sort, she could not possibly
be so lacking in decent pride as to leave her name for Smitty or Mike or
Elmer to bandy about. But she invariably did, baffled by Nick's
elusiveness. She was likely to be any one of a number. Miss Bauers
phoned: Will you tell him, please? (A nasal voice, and haughty, with the
hauteur that seeks to conceal secret fright.) Tell him it's important.
Miss Ahearn phoned: Will you tell him, please? Just say Miss Ahearn.
A-h-e-a-r-n. Miss Olson: Just Gertie. But oftenest Miss Bauers.
Cupid's messenger, wearing grease-grimed overalls and the fatuous grin
of the dalliant male, would transmit his communication to the uneager
Nick.
"'S wonder you wouldn't answer the phone once yourself. Says you was to
call Miss Bauers any time you come in between one and six at Hyde
Park--wait a min't'--yeh--Hyde Park 6079, and any time after six at----"
"Wha'd she want?"
"Well, how the hell should I know! Says call Miss Bauers any time
between one and six at Hyde Park 6----"
"Swell chanst. _Swell_ chanst!"
Which explains why the calls came oftenest for Nick. He was so
indifferent to them. You pictured the patient and persistent Miss
Bauers, or the oxlike Miss Olson, or Miss Ahearn, or just Gertie
hovering within hearing distance of the telephone listening,
listening--while one o'clock deepened to six--for the call that never
came; plucking up fresh courage at six until six o'clock dragged on to
bedtime. When next they met: "I bet you was there all the time. Pity you
wouldn't answer a call when a person leaves their name. You could of
give me a ring. I bet you was there all the time."
"Well, maybe I was."
Bewildered, she tried to retaliate with the boomerang of vituperation.
How could she know? How could she know that this slim, slick young
garage mechanic was a woodland creature in disguise--a satyr in store
clothes--a wild thing who perversely preferred to do his own pursuing?
How could Miss Bauers know--she who cashiered in the Green Front Grocery
and Market on Fifty-third Street? Or Miss Olson, at the Rialto ticket
window? Or the Celtic, emotional Miss Ahearn, the manicure? Or Gertie
the goof? They knew nothing of mythology; of pointed ears and pug noses
and goat's feet. Nick's ears, to their fond gaze, presented an honest
red surface protruding from either side of his head. His feet, in tan
laced shoes, were ordinary feet, a little more than ordinarily expert,
perhaps, in the convolutions of the dance at Englewood Masonic Hall,
which is part of Chicago's vast South Side. No; a faun, to Miss Bauers,
Miss Olson, Miss Ahearn, and just Gertie, was one of those things in the
Lincoln Park Zoo.
Perhaps, sometimes, they realized, vaguely, that Nick was different.
When, for example, they tried--and failed--to picture him looking
interestedly at one of those three-piece bedroom sets glistening like
pulled taffy in the window of the installment furniture store, while
they, shy yet proprietary, clung to his arm and eyed the price ticket.
Now $98.50. You couldn't see Nick interested in bedroom sets, in price
tickets, in any of those settled, fixed, everyday things. He was fluid,
evasive, like quicksilver, though they did not put it thus.
Miss Bauers, goaded to revolt, would say pettishly: "You're like a
mosquito, that's what. Person never knows from one minute to the other
where you're at."
"Yeh," Nick would retort. "When you know where a mosquito's at, what do
you do to him? Plenty. I ain't looking to be squashed."
Miss Ahearn, whose public position (the Hygienic Barber Shop. Gent's
manicure, 50c.) offered unlimited social opportunities, would assume a
gay indifference. "They's plenty boys begging to take me out every hour
in the day. Swell lads, too. I ain't waiting round for any greasy
mechanic like you. Don't think it. Say, lookit your nails! They'd queer
you with me, let alone what else all is wrong with you."
In answer Nick would put one hand--one broad, brown, steel-strong hand
with its broken discoloured nails--on Miss Ahearn's arm, in its flimsy
georgette sleeve. Miss Ahearn's eyelids would flutter and close, and a
little shiver would run with icy-hot feet all over Miss Ahearn.
Nick was like that.
Nick's real name wasn't Nick at all--or scarcely at all. His last name
was Nicholas, and his parents, long before they became his parents,
traced their origin to some obscure Czechoslovakian province--long
before we became so glib with our Czechoslovakia. His first name was
Dewey, knowing which you automatically know the date of his birth. It
was a patriotic but unfortunate choice on the part of his parents. The
name did not fit him; was too mealy; not debonair enough. Nick. Nicky in
tenderer moments (Miss Bauers, Miss Olson, Miss Ahearn, just Gertie, et
al.).
His method with women was firm and somewhat stern, but never brutal. He
never waited for them if they were late. Any girl who assumed that her
value was enhanced in direct proportion to her tardiness in keeping an
engagement with Nick found herself standing disconsolate on the corner
of Fifty-third and Lake trying to look as if she were merely waiting for
the Lake Park car and not peering wistfully up and down the street in
search of a slim, graceful, hurrying figure that never came.
It is difficult to convey in words the charm that Nick possessed. Seeing
him, you beheld merely a medium-sized young mechanic in reasonably
grimed garage clothes when working; and in tight pants, tight coat, silk
shirt, long-visored green cap when at leisure. A rather pallid skin due
to the nature of his work. Large deft hands, a good deal like the hands
of a surgeon, square, blunt-fingered, spatulate. Indeed, as you saw him
at work, a wire-netted electric bulb held in one hand, the other plunged
deep into the vitals of the car on which he was engaged, you thought of
a surgeon performing a major operation. He wore one of those round
skullcaps characteristic of his craft (the brimless crown of an old felt
hat). He would deftly remove the transmission case and plunge his hand
deep into the car's guts, feeling expertly about with his engine-wise
fingers as a surgeon feels for liver, stomach, gall bladder, intestines,
appendix. When he brought up his hand, all dripping with grease (which
is the warm blood of the car), he invariably had put his finger on the
sore spot.
All this, of course, could not serve to endear him to the girls. On the
contrary, you would have thought that his hands alone, from which he
could never quite free the grease and grit, would have caused some
feeling of repugnance among the lily-fingered. But they, somehow, seemed
always to be finding an excuse to touch him: his tie, his hair, his coat
sleeve. They seemed even to derive a vicarious thrill from holding his
hat or cap when on an outing. They brushed imaginary bits of lint from
his coat lapel. They tried on his seal ring, crying: "Oo, lookit, how
big it is for me, even my thumb!" He called this "pawing a guy over";
and the lint ladies he designated as "thread pickers."
No; it can't be classified, this powerful draw he had for them. His
conversation furnished no clue. It was commonplace conversation,
limited, even dull. When astonished, or impressed, or horrified, or
amused, he said: "Ken yuh feature that!" When emphatic or confirmatory,
he said: "You _tell_ 'em!"
It wasn't his car and the opportunities it furnished for drives, both
country and city. That motley piece of mechanism represented such an
assemblage of unrelated parts as could only have been made to coördinate
under Nick's expert guidance. It was out of commission more than half
the time, and could never be relied upon to furnish a holiday. Both
Miss Bauers and Miss Ahearn had twelve-cylinder opportunities that
should have rendered them forever unfit for travel in Nick's one-lung
vehicle of locomotion.
It wasn't money. Though he was generous enough with what he had, Nick
couldn't be generous with what he hadn't. And his wage at the garage was
$40 a week. Miss Ahearn's silk stockings cost $4.50.
His unconcern should have infuriated them, but it served to pique. He
wasn't actually as unconcerned as he appeared, but he had early learned
that effort in their direction was unnecessary. Nick had little
imagination; a gorgeous selfishness; a tolerantly contemptuous liking
for the sex. Naturally, however, his attitude toward them had been
somewhat embittered by being obliged to watch their method of driving a
car in and out of the Ideal Garage doorway. His own manipulation of the
wheel was nothing short of wizardry.
He played the harmonica.
Each Thursday afternoon was Nick's half day off. From twelve until
seven-thirty he was free to range the bosky highways of Chicago. When
his car--he called it "the bus"--was agreeable, he went awheel in search
of amusement. The bus being indisposed, he went afoot. He rarely made
plans in advance; usually was accompanied by some successful
telephonee. He rather liked to have a silken skirt beside him fluttering
and flirting in the breeze as he broke the speed regulations.
On this Thursday afternoon in July he had timed his morning job to a
miraculous nicety so that at the stroke of twelve his workaday garments
dropped from him magically, as though he were a male (and reversed)
Cinderella. There was a wash room and a rough sort of sleeping room
containing two cots situated in the second story of the Ideal Garage.
Here Nick shed the loose garments of labour for the fashionably tight
habiliments of leisure. Private chauffeurs whose employers housed their
cars in the Ideal Garage used this nook for a lounge and smoker. Smitty,
Mike, Elmer, and Nick snatched stolen siestas there in the rare absences
of the manager. Sometimes Nick spent the night there when forced to work
overtime. His home life, at best, was a sketchy affair. Here chauffeurs,
mechanics, washers lolled at ease exchanging soft-spoken gossip, motor
chat, speculation, comment, and occasional verbal obscenity. Each
possessed a formidable knowledge of that neighbourhood section of
Chicago known as Hyde Park. This knowledge was not confined to car costs
and such impersonal items, but included meals, scandals, relationships,
finances, love affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often played
his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal length of it in throbbing
rendition of such sure-fire sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or
Mammy, while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping feet or
wagging heads.
To-day the hot little room was empty except for Nick, shaving before the
cracked mirror on the wall, and old Elmer, reading a scrap of
yesterday's newspaper as he lounged his noon hour away. Old Elmer was
thirty-seven, and Nicky regarded him as an octogenarian. Also, old
Elmer's conversation bored Nick to the point of almost sullen
resentment. Old Elmer was a family man. His talk was all of his
family--the wife, the kids, the flat. A garrulous person, lank, pasty,
dish-faced, and amiable. His half day off was invariably spent tinkering
about the stuffy little flat--painting, nailing up shelves, mending a
broken window shade, puttying a window, playing with his pasty little
boy, aged sixteen months, and his pasty little girl, aged three years.
Next day he regaled his fellow workers with elaborate recitals of his
holiday hours.
"Believe me, that kid's a caution. Sixteen months old, and what does he
do yesterday? He unfastens the ketch on the back-porch gate. We got a
gate on the back porch, see." (This frequent "see" which interlarded
Elmer's verbiage was not used in an interrogatory way, but as a period,
and by way of emphasis. His voice did not take the rising inflection as
he uttered it.) "What does he do, he opens it. I come home, and the wife
says to me: 'Say, you better get busy and fix a new ketch on that gate
to the back porch. Little Elmer, first thing I know, he'd got it open
to-day and was crawling out almost.' Say, can you beat that for a kid
sixteen months----"
Nick had finished shaving, had donned his clean white soft shirt. His
soft collar fitted to a miracle about his strong throat. Nick's
sartorial effects were a triumph--on forty a week. "Say, can't you talk
about nothing but that kid of yours? I bet he's a bum specimen at that.
Runt, like his pa."
Elmer flung down his newspaper in honest indignation as Nick had
wickedly meant he should. "Is that so! Why, we was wrastling round--me
and him, see--last night on the floor, and what does he do, he raises
his mitt and hands me a wallop in the stomick it like to knock the wind
out of me. That's all. Sixteen months----"
"Yeh. I suppose this time next year he'll be boxing for money."
Elmer resumed his paper. "What do _you_ know." His tone mingled pity
with contempt.
Nick took a last critical survey of the cracked mirror's reflection and
found it good. "Nothing, only this: you make me sick with your kids and
your missus and your place. Say, don't you never have no fun?"
"Fun! Why, say, last Sunday we was out to the beach, and the kid swum
out first thing you know----"
"Oh, shut up!" He was dressed now. He slapped his pockets. Harmonica.
Cigarettes. Matches. Money. He was off, his long-visored cloth cap
pulled jauntily over his eyes.