"What do you mean?" said Stern in panic.
"Talking like that. You trying to make fun of us?"
"Of course not," Stern said.
"What did you say lovely for? We're just a bunch of guys. The way I see
it, you think maybe you're better than the rest of us."
"It's just a way to say something, is all," said Stern.
The boy was a strange mixture, exploding with rage one minute and
lapsing into a mood of great gentleness the next. The latter quality
took over now, and he began to pour out his thoughts, as though he
might never have another chance to talk to someone so smart he used
"lovely" and wasn't even showing off. It was as though the occasion
called for conversation only on the highest level.
"I've got bad blood," he said, the violence gone. "I couldn't get into
the Army with it. I work on high wires, you know. I'm the only one who
don't use a safety harness. You know, I'll just swing from one wire to
another. The guys see me, they flip out. I'm not afraid of anything.
You get killed; so what? Then my blood gets lousy and I have to stay
in bed three months, six months, I don't care. I just like to have
freedom. A bunch of us guys was sitting around at Coney Island eating a
plate of kraut and the man comes over and says it's time to close and
takes away my plate of kraut. He didn't say it nice or anything. Right
away he's stepping on our head. So we really give it to him and run the
hell out of there. I hit him with the whole table.
"But you see what I mean?" he said with an overwhelming tenderness, as
though Stern were his first link with civilization and he wanted Stern
to interpret his position before the world. "A guy has to have freedom.
The whole trouble with everything is that there's always somebody
stepping on your head when you're eating a bowl of kraut."
"Sounds pretty reasonable," said Stern.
"Are you sure you're not trying to show us up?" the boy said, erupting
again and taking Stern by the collar.
"No," Stern said, imagining the boy hitting him with a table.
"You're all right," the boy said, the gentleness returning. "I'll bet
the only reason you have a fat ass is because you're sick, right?"
"That's why," said Stern.
"Maybe one night--George, you, and me--we all go downtown to get some
beers."
By sliding and slipping from railings to banisters, Rooney had attached
himself to a pole close to the trio. "You know who don't have a pot to
piss in?" he said. "The guys who run this place. They don't eat good at
all, do they?" he said, chuckling deeply and clinging to the pole like
a many-legged insect.
The little staff room inside the front door lit up now, and from
within, behind a counter, the Negro attendant said, "Line up for
bandage and pill. Staff quarters are not to be entered."
The porch people lined up outside the staff room, Rooney sliding and
clinging along as the line moved. The old actor had come downstairs
and was standing alongside a dark-haired woman with sticklike legs
and a thin mustache. Her head was covered with a kerchief and she
tittered shyly as the old actor whispered things into her ear. He was
very courtly toward her, making deep, gallant bows, and Stern wondered
whether he had shown her any medallions. Stern stood at the end of
the line next to a paunchy, middle-aged man who introduced himself as
Feldner. "You're an intestinal, I hear," the man said. "I had what
you had, only now I'm in here worrying about something else. You're a
pretty smart boy. I heard you say lovely to those kids. What do you do?"
"I write labels for products," said Stern.
"I worked the casinos all my life," said the man. "All over Europe,
lately the Caribbean. But I was always betting on the wrong rejyme. I'd
put my money on a rejyme, see, and then I'd be working a table, making
my three clams a week, when bingo, a plane flies over, drops a bomb,
and we got no more casino. Once again Feldner's got his money on the
wrong rejyme. One rejyme in South America give me an ulcer, what you
got. But now I'm worrying about something else. How'd you like to write
a book about a guy who always bet his money on the wrong rejyme?"
When Stern's turn came, he saw that the Negro, inside the staff room,
had taken off his intern's jacket. He had great turbulent shoulder
muscles, and Stern wondered what his legs looked like, all fitted up in
their contraptions.
"Bullet got me in the high ass region," he said, his back to Stern,
preparing Stern's medication. "Pacific. It pinched off a nerve and
caused my legs not to move."
Stern welcomed the sudden intimacy and said, "You get around fine. I
never saw anyone handle things so smoothly. When I was a kid, I used to
go up to the Apollo on Amateur Night in Harlem. You'd see some really
fine acts there. That's where Lena started, and Billy Eckstine." He
put his foot inside the door and the Negro turned swiftly, jaw muscles
pumped up with rage, and said, "There is not to be any entering of the
staff room."
Stern said, "All right." He was the last one in line, and when he had
swallowed his medicine, the Negro lowered the staff-room light and
Stern went upstairs. On the top step the half man was waiting for him,
a bandage around his neck. As Stern approached, he flung open his
bathrobe in the shadows and said, "Look what they did to me," his voice
coming from a static-filled car radio on a rainy night. Stern pushed by
him, making himself thin so as not to touch him, closing his eyes so as
not to see him, not daring to breathe for fear he would have to smell
the neck bandage. He got into his narrow room and shut the door tight
and wondered whether the half man would wait outside the door until
he was sleeping and then slip into bed beside him, enclosing the two
of them in his bathrobe. The old actor was wheezing deeply and Stern
got between the damp merchant marine sheets, wondering whether Fabiola
hadn't made a mistake in sending him to this place where he had to look
at half men, as though to get a preview of horrors in store for him.
He touched his middle and, disappointed that the great globe of pain
still existed, began to pat it and knead it down, as though to hurry
along the treatment. As always, his last thoughts before dropping off
to a nightmare of sleep were of the man down the street. It struck him
as unfair that no matter how many pills he put inside his stomach, no
matter how gently he rubbed and patted it, no matter how healthy he
got at the Grove Rest Home, he would still have to go home and drive
past the man's house twice a day. The man would still be there to start
Stern's belly swelling again. How unfair it was. Couldn't bodies of
medical people be dispatched to tell the man that Stern was receiving
treatment, was getting better, and he was to leave him alone and not
bother his wife and child, otherwise Stern would crack with pain once
more? Bodies of medical people with enforcement powers. Couldn't Grove
send a group of envoys of this nature on ahead of him before he got
home, so the man would know?
* * * * *
Stern awakened the following morning to a sweetly cool summer morning,
and waiting to welcome him was the actor, standing barefooted in a
great tentlike pair of old actor's underwear, sequined in places,
gathering the folds of it into his stained pants, and rubbing his
meager arms.
"Got to get the pee moving," he said. "What did you think of my doll?
That's good stuff, boy. Gonna get me some of that stuff."
Stern said she was very nice and dressed quickly. The old actor, still
rubbing his arms, said, "You ought to try this. Nothing like it to get
your wang-wang in shape."
Downstairs, on the porch, the Griggs people stood around silently
in the dewy morning, and when Stern and the actor arrived, they all
began a dumb march to the dining room, a broken parade led by the
tall, erupting boy with the boneless, insect-like Rooney in his arms.
Carrying Rooney was a privilege that went to the strongest of the
group. After them came the Greek boy, wheeling along furiously, saying,
"Wait up, fuckers," and then the main body, followed finally by the
half man, old-fashioned toothache towel around his neck, radio-croaking
to the wind. In the dining room he took a table by himself. Stern sat
with Feldner and a small, scowling man who kept invoking the power of
his labor union. He tried a roll, found it hard, and said, "I don't
have to eat a roll like that."
"Why not?" Stern asked.
"I belong to a powerful union."
Later, when his eggs were served, he said, "Union gets you the best
eggs in the country."
Stern ordered some cereal. When he took a spoonful, Feldner stopped his
hand and said, "You can't eat that."
"How come?" Stern said.
"Not in the condition you're in," he said. "I had what you got. You're
a nice kid, but it would tear you up."
"I get to eat cereals," said Stern. He buttered some bread and Feldner
said, "Are you trying to commit suicide? I told you I had what you got.
I been all over the world, in every kind of country. You're in no shape
to eat that."
"I have a different kind of doctor," Stern said, eating the bread but
wondering whether Feldner's doctor wasn't better than Fabiola.
"There's only one thing you can eat with what you got," said Feldner.
"What's that?" Stern asked.
"Hot stew. The warm is what you need. It warms you up in there and
heals everything up. The way you're eating, you're dead in a month."
"I have a doctor who says bread and cereal are all right," Stern said,
but the pain ball seemed to blow up suddenly beneath his belt and he
wondered whether to call Fabiola and check on stew.
At the next table, the old actor made courtly, charming nods at the
mustached stick woman. When she turned to blow her nose, he stuck a
fork up through his legs, poked Rooney, who clung to a chair next to
him, and said, "Hey, get this wang-wang."
At Stern's table the sullen, scowling man said, "They don't take
oddballs in my union. Any crap and out you go." Finishing his meal,
Feldner patted his lips and said, "You better be careful, kid. I know
what you got in there. You can't go eating shit. You get the hot of a
stew in there and you'll see how nice it feels. I know. I'm worrying
about something else, but I had what you got."
At the meal's end, the half man, who had sat alone, eating swiftly and
furtively, got to his feet and began to gather everyone's dirty dishes
and stack them in piles.
"It's always the worst ones who are the nicest," said the plump
dining-room waitress. "It was that way at Mother Francesca's, too."
Stern had been aware of the half man eating alone, had felt his eyes,
and at one point had been compelled to go and sit with him, staring
right at his neck bandage and saying, "Don't worry. I'll sit with you.
In fact, I'll stay with you until the last half is taken away." He felt
that maybe if he sat with the half man, someone would sit with _him_
later, when he himself began losing halves. But on his way out of the
dining room, when the half man looked up at him, he ran by frightened,
as though he didn't see him.
Outside, the old actor grabbed him and, pointing to the mustached woman
up ahead, whispered, "I'm going to get me some of that. That's real
sweet stuff. You got to work it slow when you're handling one of them
sweet dolls."
* * * * *
Stern stayed five weeks at the Grove Rest Home, and during this period
the pain balloon that had crowded tight against his ribs began to
recede until he was able to fasten the snaps of his trousers around his
great girth. On some mornings during these weeks he would awaken and
for an instant feel he was at the New Everglades, a mountain resort
where he often spent summers as a child with his mother. Those summers
days he would get up early and run down to cut a purple snowball
flower for his mother to wear, wet and glistening in her hair, at the
breakfast table. They were lazy, wicked times, and since he was the
only young boy at the resort, he spent them among young women, playing
volleyball with them, doing calisthenics, and staring fascinatedly at
the elasticized garments they kept tugging at as the material crept
below their shorts line. Afternoons he would lie in the bottom of a
boat while his great-breasted mother, wearing a polka-dotted bathing
suit that stared at him like a thousand nipples, rowed across the
narrow resort river to the hut of a forest ranger who lived in the
woods opposite the resort all year long. Stern hunted mussels in the
shallow river water alongside the hut, and when his mother emerged from
the hut she would say to him in the boat, "A hundred girls at the hotel
and I'm the only one can make him." To which Stern answered, "I don't
want to hear anything like that." Later, in the afternoon, Stern would
sit at the resort bar with his mother, taking sips of her drink while
his mother told the bartender, "That doesn't frighten me. I'll give him
a little drink at his age. It's the ones that don't get a little drink
from their mothers you have to worry about."
The men around his mother at the bar told dirty jokes to her, and one
afternoon one of them, holding his palms wide apart and parallel, said,
"Baby, my buddy here has one this long, so help me." His mother folded
up with laughter on her barstool, and Stern, suddenly infuriated, hit
the man in the stomach to protect her. His mother pulled him back and
said, "You can't say things to his mother. He'll kill for her." Later,
getting ready for dinner, Stern's mother would take him into the shower
with her and he would stare at the pathetic, gaping blackness between
her legs, filled with a terrible anguish and loss. Then he would
rush down to cut another flower for her and, in the coolness of the
evening, begin to feel very lush and elegant, as though no other boy
in the world was having as wicked and luxurious a time as he, the only
boy in a grown-up resort. His mother would tell him, "You're growing
up too fast. You know more than kids ten years older than you." And
later in the year, at school, Stern would tell his friends, "Boy, do I
know things. Did I see things this summer. My mother isn't like other
mothers. She just doesn't go around acting like a mother." And yet,
with all the panty glimpses on the volleyball court and the barroom
sips of drinks, the dirty jokes and the nervous showers, what did he
actually know? It remained for a busboy in back of the resort kitchen
to tell him about the sex act. Stern couldn't believe the actual
machinery and said, "Really?" and the busboy said, "Yeah. When you put
it in them, they get a funny feeling up their kazoo."
The Grove Rest Home had the sweet summer coolness and the proper
fragrance, but it was a parody of a resort, with all its facilities
torn and incomplete. Stern heard there was a small golf course and
borrowed clubs one morning, setting out to look for it. He tramped
the length of the institution and finally spotted a flag in the
center of some tall weeds far beyond the kitchen. A bald man with a
thick mustache stood alongside the single hole of the golf course,
hands locked behind his back, puffing out his cheeks and flexing
an artificial leg in the style of a British colonel surveying a
battlefield. He said he was an electrician. A hot wire had fallen on
his leg and sheared it off. His main difficulty had been in dealing
with his grown son, who couldn't get used to having a one-legged
father. "I told him you get older, these things happen, but he wouldn't
buy it and kept spitting on the floor." The man spoke with a thick
Brooklyn accent, but when he was silent, flexing his leg, he took on
an amazingly autocratic demeanor, a British colonel once again. "Are
you playing?" Stern asked him. "No, I'm just standing next to the hole
here."
The golf course was a broken, one-holed, weeded one, and Stern's days
at the Grove Rest Home seemed weeded and broken, too. There were no
scheduled activities, and between meals Stern passed the time in the
library, reading peripheral books, ones written by people who had been
close to Thomas Dewey and others about Canada's part in World War II.
The only newspaper available was a terrible local one devoted almost
entirely to zoning developments, but Stern waited for it eagerly at
the front door each night, pacing up and down until it came. He looked
forward, too, to "milk and cookie" each evening at seven, which was the
nearest thing at the Home to a special treat. One night, when he was
in line for his refreshment, the mustached woman squatted down on the
front porch and began to urinate, throwing her kerchiefed head back
and hollering, "Pisscock, pisscock." Gears clanking and grinding and
seemingly slower than ever, Lennie came out from the staff room and
made for her, finally getting there and carrying the woman, screaming,
up to her room. Later, Stern learned she had been taken to Rosenkranz.
In the room that night, the old actor said, "I really liked that doll.
She was sweet stuff, I mean really sweet. Too bad she got the mentals.
When she gets out of here, I'm going to get me some of that stuff, you
wait and see."
Most of the climactic events at Grove seemed to take place on the
porch during "milk and cookie." Another night, the scowling union man,
two places ahead of Stern, fell forward and died. The patients made a
circle around him, as though he were "it" in a sick game, and Rooney
hollered, "Give him mouth-to-mouth." Afraid he would be called upon
to do this, Stern said, "I'll get someone," and ran wildly into the
field beyond the building, making believe he was going through the
proper procedure for handling recent deaths. He came back after a few
minutes to look at the union man on the floor. It was the first dead
person Stern had seen, and the man did not look sweet and peaceful, as
though he were asleep. He looked very bad, as though he had a terrible
stomach-ache. No one had done anything yet, and the half man was now
standing in the circle, croaking, "See what happens. See." It was as
though he was allowed to stand with the others only on occasions such
as this, a thing he knew all about. Finally Lennie arrived, stern and
poised, and leaned over the man. "This is a death," he said coolly,
and Stern thought to himself, "Why did Fabiola send me here? How can
I possibly be helped by seeing guys dying and half men? He made a
mistake."
Yet, despite the wild urination and the curled-up dead man, Stern's
pain diminished gradually. Sometimes, when he sat in the fields on
endlessly long afternoons, waiting for the days to pass, he would probe
his middle cautiously, as though he expected to find that the ulcer
had only been playing dead and would leap out at him suddenly, bigger
than ever. But the circle of pain had grown small and Stern thought how
wonderful it would be if the kike man was getting smaller too, if when
he got back to his house, he could find the man completely gone, his
house erased, all traces of him vanished, as though he'd been taken by
acid or never existed.
* * * * *
One morning, late in Stern's stay, word spread that two industrial
teams were coming to play baseball for the patients at the Home. There
was much excitement, and Stern felt sorry for those shriveled people
whose only fun had been at YMCA's and merchant marine recreation
parlors. Not one had ever seen _My Fair Lady_, and it was small wonder
they looked forward with such delight to a clash between two industrial
teams. In early evening, the night of the game, Stern took his place in
the dumb march formation and walked to the field, poking his belly and
feeling around for the pain flower. It had been replaced by a thin,
crawling brocade of tenderness that seemed to lay wet on the front
of his body and was a little better than the other. But he wondered
whether the ulcer might not roll forth in a great flower once again, at
the first trace of friction, and then he would have the two, the flower
and the brocade. He was aware that in just a few days he would have to
go back to the kike man. What would happen if he merely drove by once,
saw the man's great arms taking out garbage cans, and felt the flower
instantly fill his stomach, one glimpse wiping out five weeks at the
Grove Rest Home? And what if it went on that way, five weeks at Grove,
one glimpse at arms, another five weeks at Grove, arms, until one day
the flower billowed out too far and burst and everything important ran
out of him and there was no more?
Stern walked behind the tall, sputtering, explosive boy, who led the
march with Rooney in his arms. "You know who we ought to take up a
collection for?" Rooney asked Stern as the Rest Home people took seats
in the front row of the small grandstand.
"Who's that?" asked Stern.
"Yogi Berra," cackled Rooney. "I understand he's down to his last
thirty-five cents." The tall boy poured him onto a bench in the front
row and he clung gelatinlike to it, saying, "That Berra doesn't make
ten bucks the whole season," and shaking with laughter. Stern sat
between the tall, erupting young boy and Feldner. The boy, who was
alternately nice and violent to Stern, asked him, "Did you ever play
any ball before you picked up all that ass fat?"
"A little bit," Stern said. "And I'm not that heavy back there." He was
afraid of the boy's sudden eruption and wondered why the boy couldn't
be nice to him all the time. Violence was such a waste. It didn't
accomplish anything. Stern had to worry that the boy would suddenly
erupt and push him through the grandstand seats, maybe snapping his
back like wood. He wanted to tell the boy, "Be nice to me at all times
and I'll tell you things that will make you smart. I'll lend you books
and, when we both get out, take you to a museum, explaining any hard
things."
One of the teams represented a cash register company and the other
a dry cleaning plant, and as they warmed up, the old actor ran out
onto the field, stuck a bat between his legs, and hollered to the
grandstand, "Hey, get this wang-wang. Ain't she a beaut?" A tall,
light-skinned, austere Jamaican Stern thought might have been a
healthy-legged brother of Lennie was the umpire, and he thumbed the
actor back into the stands, saying, "Infraction," and then folded his
arms and jutted his chin to the sky, as though defying thousands.
In the stands, Feldner, in a bathrobe and slippers, shoulders stooped
from years of bending over crap tables, said to Stern, "We had softball
games when I was working under one of the Venezuela rejymes. You know
how long that rejyme lasted? Four days. I really backed some beauties.
That's how I got what you got."
Stern felt sorry for Feldner in his bathrobe, a man whose shoulders
had grown sad from so many disappointments, and wanted to hug him
to make him feel better. Once, Stern's mother, infuriated at having
her clothing allowance cut down by his father, had gone on a strike,
wearing nothing but old bathrobes in the street. This had embarrassed
Stern, who had turned away from her each time she had walked past him
and his friends. Now Stern wanted to embrace Feldner as though to make
it up to his mother for turning his back on her saintlike bathrobed
street marches.
Stern watched the men on the two teams pepper the ball around the field
and then looked at them individually, wondering if there were any on
either team he could beat up. They all seemed fair-skinned and agile,
and Stern decided there were none, until he spotted one he might have
been able to take, a small, bald one playing center field for the cash
register team. But then a ball was hit to the small player and he came
in for it with powerful legs churning furiously and Stern decided
_he_ might be too rough, also. He imagined the small, stumplike legs
churning toward him in a rage and was sure the little man would be able
to pound him to the ground, using endurance and wiriness and leg power.
A black-haired Puerto Rican girl came to sit with the tall, erupting,
blond boy. She helped a nurse take care of a group of feebleminded
children connected to the Home and Stern had seen her with a pen of
them, doing things slow-motion in the sun. From a distance she seemed
to resemble Gene Tierney, but up close he saw that she was a battered
Puerto Rican caricature of Gene Tierney, Tierney being hauled out of
a car wreck in which her face had gone into the windshield. She did
things slow-motion, in the style of the retarded children she helped
supervise. Sitting on the ground in front of the tall, blond, fuselike
boy, she said, "You promised we were goin' dancin'."
"Shut your ass," the tall boy said. "Hey, you want to hear one? Two
nudists, man and a broad, had to break up. You know why? They were
seein' too much of each other."
The Puerto Rican girl giggled and leaned forward in slow motion to
tickle the tall boy. Stern saw her as a Gene Tierney doll manhandled by
retarded children in temper tantrums, then mended in a toy hospital.
"Your sense of humor is very much of the earth," she said.
The tall boy introduced Stern to the girl. "This is Mr. Stern," he
said. "He's a swell guy, even though he's got a fat ass. I'm sorry, Mr.
Stern; only kidding. He's really a good guy. Real smart."
"Listen to this one," the boy continued. "I know a guy who was invited
out by Rita Hayworth. He was in her house at the time." The tall boy
erupted with laughter and the Puerto Rican girl tickled him again in
slow motion. Turning to Stern, she said, "He's a natural man. I'd like
to feel his energy coursing through my vitals." In the distance, Stern
had imagined her hips to be flaring and substantial, but actually
they had a kind of diving, low-slung poverty about them. She wore a
skintight blue skirt, and Stern wondered whether she hadn't worn it for
an entire year and was to wear it the next three until poverty-stricken
Puerto Rican underwear came bursting through its fabric. Still, the
combination of Latin eroticism and intellect flashes appealed to him.
It was a painful thought, and he actually gritted his teeth as it came
to him, but he had to allow it to come through. This tattered Puerto
Rican watcher of feeb kids was probably smarter than his wife, close
to what he'd really wanted. She probably knew undreamed-of, exotic
Puerto Rican love tricks. He could bring her lovely sets of underwear,
tighten up some of her poetic allusions, and make her the perfect
wife. He wished she was tickling him instead of the tall boy. Stern
smiled at the girl. He wanted to tell her he knew better jokes, smooth
situational ones, and if only she gave him a fair chance, several days
of intensive conversation, she would see he was a better bet than the
tall, corny boy. But he felt very old and heavy and was unable to speak.
"Got another," said the sputtering, fuselike, blond boy. "Would you
rather be in back of a hack with a WAC or in front of a jeep with a
creep?"
The girl dug her fingers hungrily into his ribs, saying, "You promised
we'd go dancin'."
"Eat shit," the tall boy said, brushing her aside. "You know," he said
to Stern, "I was once in bed for eight months. My kid sister took care
of me in a little room just big enough for the two of us. Every once
in a while my veins give out and I can't do anything. I don't give a
shit. You live, you live; you die, you die. Only thing I care about is
freedom and old guys not pushing you around."
The game had begun now, and the wheelchaired Greek boy had maneuvered
himself alongside the bench in the front row. He stuck his hand
under the Puerto Rican girl's dress and she cringed back against the
tall, grenadelike youth, saying, "I intensely dislike duos." Stern
wondered what would happen if he went under there, too. He envied the
wheelchaired boy. He'd gone under and nothing had happened. He hadn't
been hauled off into court.
The Greek boy stared out at the cash register company pitcher and said,
"He's a crudhead. I could steal his ass off. He makes one move to pitch
and I'm on third like a shot."
"What are you gonna do?" said the tall boy. "Crawl on your balls?"
"Shut up, tithead," said the Greek boy.
Feldner nudged Stern and said, "I used to like baseball, but there was
only one rejyme ever let us play." Then he hollered out, "Swing, baby,
swing; you can hit him, baby," as though to demonstrate to Stern his
familiarity with the game.
"See," he said, and Stern wanted to take him around and soothe him
for being a bathrobed failure who was worried about a mysterious new
something inside him.
Sitting in the grandstand now, feeling Feldner's warm, bathrobed bulk
against him, Stern, despite the tender sheet that lay wet against the
front of his body, felt somewhat comfortable and took a deep breath,
as though to enjoy to the fullest the last few days before his return
to the kike man. He was afraid of the charged and sputtering boy on
his left, afraid that in a violent, pimpled, swiftly changing mood he
might suddenly smash Stern back through the grandstand benches. Yet,
despite the grenadelike boy, Stern still felt good being at a ball
game among people he knew, broken as they were. He had cut himself off
from people for a long time, it seemed, living as he did in a cold and
separate place, and he thought now how nice it would be if all these
people were his neighbors, Rooney in a split-level, Feldner next door
in a ranch, and the old actor nearby in a converted barn. Even the
half man would not be so bad to have around, living out his time in an
adjacent colonial until the last half was taken away. All of them would
form a buffer zone between Stern and the man down the street. That way,
if the kike man ever came to fight him on his lawn, his neighbors would
gather on the property and say, "Hands off. He's a nice guy. Touch him
and we'll open your head."
Late in the game, a line drive caught the little bald cash register
outfielder in the nose and he went down behind second base with a great
red bloodflower in the center of his face. There were no substitute
ballplayers, and the austere Jamaican umpire, flipping through the
rule book, said, "Forfeit," jutting his chin toward the grandstand, as
though ready to withstand a hail of abuse.
"I'll run that coon the hell out of here," said the wheelchaired Greek,
waving his fist. "I come to see a ball game."
"That's right," said the tall boy, pimples flaring, beginning to
ignite. Suddenly, his face softened. He grabbed Stern's collar and
shouted, "We got someone. This guy here will play. Don't mind his fat
ass." To Stern, he said, "I didn't mean that. I know you can't help
it." He turned to the Puerto Rican girl and said, "Hey, a man brings
home a donkey, see. So all day he goes around patting his ass."
The girl smiled, showing salt-white teeth with only the tiniest chip
on a front one. She lay back, putting her head on the tall boy's lap
and waggling a leg lazily, so that a gleam of Puerto Rican underwear
caught the sunlight. "Boredom and you are ever enemies," she said to
the tall boy. "Please sneak out and take me dancin'." The others in the
stands were cheering for Stern now, and he stood up, afraid the tall
boy's pimples might sputter into violence again and also not wanting to
hurt anyone's feelings. It was easy to just start trotting out toward
the field. He fully expected to turn back with a big smile and say,
"I'm not going out there. Not when I'm sick." But he found himself
jogging all the way out to center field, unable to get himself to
return. Winded, he stood in a crouch, hands on knees, as though capable
of fast, dynamic spurts after balls. He hoped the Puerto Rican girl was
watching and would see him as being potentially lithe and graceful,
equal to the tall boy. Feldner ran out in his bathrobe and slippers and
said, "Do you know what will happen to you? With what you got? You play
and you're dead in a minute and a half."
Stern motioned him back, saying, "I'm not sure I have what you had.
Everyone's got a different kind of thing." But when Feldner turned
away, discouraged, Stern was sorry he had been harsh to a man in a
bathrobe.
From the stands, Stern heard the Greek boy shout, "You show 'em, fat
ass," and Stern hoped the girl would not think of him only as a man
with a giant behind. The austere Jamaican umpire checked Stern, looked
at his rule book, said, "Legalistic," and turned stoically toward the
wind.
The second hitter hit a pop fly to short center field, and Stern,
since childhood afraid to turn his back and go after balls hit past
him, joyfully ran forward and caught the ball with his fingertips, so
thrilled it had been hit in front of him he almost cried. He did a
professional slap forward and returned the ball to the infield, wishing
at that moment the kike man was there so he could see that Jews did
not sit all day in mysterious temples but were regular and played
baseball and, despite a tendency to short-windedness, had good throwing
arms.
A sick, reedlike cheer came from the torn people in the grandstand
after Stern's catch. At the end of the inning, he trotted toward the
dugout and heard the Greek boy say, "Nice one, fat ass, baby," but
he averted his eyes with DiMaggio-like reserve and sat on the cash
register team's bench. Feldner came over in his bathrobe and said,
"What did I tell you?"
"What do you mean?" said Stern.
"Look at yourself. You should see your face."
"I look all right," said Stern. "And I'm playing now." Sitting among
the lean, neutral-faced cash register team, he was ashamed of Feldner's
bathrobed presence and motioned him away. But, as Feldner left, Stern
again regretted his curtness and wanted to shout, "Come back. You're
more to me than these blond fellows."
Stern got to bat in the inning. Afraid the dry cleaning pitcher had
discovered his Jewishness and planned to put a bloodflower between
his eyes, too, he swung on the first pitch, hitting it on the ground.
Forgetting to run, he stood on the base path and actually squeezed with
his bowels, hoping the ball would get past the third baseman. When it
filtered through the infield for a hit, Stern hollered "Yoo" and ran
to first, sending home the runner in front of him and tying the score.
His team won in that inning and the patients gathered round him on the
field. "You clobber their ass, baby," said the Greek boy with genuine
sincerity, reaching up from the wheelchair to pat Stern's back. The
tall boy, with gentleness in his lips, the ticking in him fading, said,
"No fooling, you get around good. I mean, for a guy with a can like
yours." The Puerto Rican girl, still lying on the bench with gaping
skirt, said, "We're all goin' dancin' tonight. Either alfresco or in
my place. The group has much charm." Only Feldner had misgivings. "You
signed your death warrant out there," he said, and for a moment Stern
felt a bubble tremble outward inside him; he was certain he was going
to have to pay for his indiscretion by starting from scratch with a
brand new ulcer, slightly larger and a fraction more formidable than
his first. But the bubble fluttered and withered, like a wave breaking,
and the patients kept congratulating him. He had struck a blow for
sickness. As a reward he got to carry Rooney back to the porch for
evening "milk and cookie."
* * * * *
Late that night, the tall, blond boy and the wheelchaired Greek came
for Stern as he sat alone on the porch. The others had gone to bed and
the tall boy said, "We're meeting the kid with the boobs on the outside
tonight. I figure we get a few beers and, later, diddle her boobs."
"I take her upstairs and do some jazzing," said the boy in the
wheelchair.
Stern, flattered at being selected by the two, and not really sure how
to say no, got up from his chair, giddy and dangerous in the night.
The trio started down the corridor and then heard Lennie rasping and
clattering after them, a man with a machine shop going full blast below
his waist.
"There is to be no disobedience of the nighttime rules," he said, and,
as the boys turned to face him, Stern wondered which side he would be
on in a fight. He imagined Lennie standing against the wall, looking
patiently at Stern, while the tall boy bent his contraptions and tore
out his clamps and gears and the Greek boy hit him many times on the
head to no avail. Stern pictured himself watching this, frozen to
the side, asking Lennie, "Do you need any help?" And then Lennie, his
machinery mangled, finally turning from Stern with great calm and
slowly rising up, trunklike and great-armed, to hug the breath out of
the two boys, subduing them for the night.
As it was, the Greek boy merely wheeled around, saying "Coon fucker"
under his breath, and the tall boy, with great sweetness, said, "We
were just being happy with Mr. Stern for getting a hit with a fat ass."
The two boys returned to the dormitory, and as Stern walked after them,
the Negro stopped him and said, "There can be a little staying up later
sometimes. If authorities come, though, I didn't see you."
Stern said, "Thank you," but he felt very uncomfortable about the favor
and wanted to do a thousand quick ones for the Negro. He wanted to
tell him that if he ever got into trouble with the police, he could
hide in Stern's house, or if he ever wound up helpless and drugged on
Welfare Island, Stern would go take a taxi in the middle of the night
and cut through red tape to get him into a decent hospital. But the
Negro clattered off in a metallic symphony and Stern sat guiltily on a
chair, staring off at the winking lights of Rosenkranz. He stayed up
late, sucking in the dewy air, exulting in its freshness, aware there
were only a few days before his return to the kike man and yet thrilled
that there were those few days. He wished that he were clever enough
to stretch his mind so that he could turn those days into eternities,
fondling each second, stretching it, cramming a lifetime into it before
yielding it selfishly for the next one. Perhaps if he stayed on the
porch and stared at the night, pinned it with his eyes, he would be
able to hold it there and forever block out daylight. Across the field
he studied Rosenkranz and wondered whether at some future date he might
not himself be taken there, ulcer-free but a mindless urinator now,
squatting beside the others, filling the corridors with a giant stream
and cackling at the walls.
* * * * *
The following night, the three evaded Lennie and dashed drunkenly at
midnight across the lawn toward the main gate, the tall, blond boy
propelling the Greek ahead, as though the wheelchaired youth were a
wild street hoop. "We meet that coon fucker tonight," said the Greek,
his vehicle skidding across the wet grass, "he and me going to tangle
asses." Stern kept looking back over his shoulder at the main building,
as though he were a child running away from home, taking one giddy step
and then another but always remaining close enough to dash back and
say he was only fooling. He wondered what punishment Lennie would mete
out if they were caught--and could he protest it to a higher authority
without appearing to be anti-Negro? If Lennie made him stay in his
room, for example. Since there were only a few days left, he would
probably stay in there and let it go without fuss.
The tall boy suddenly released the wheelchair and flicked his body to
the top branches of a tree like a whip, swinging easily in the wind.
"Aren't I a crazy bastard?" he said from above. "That's what the guys
said when I was working on high wires. I never used a safety harness. I
don't care if I fall down and break my head." He swung from branch to
branch like a lean night animal and the Greek boy said, "I'm cutting
out. I don't want to do no stuff on trees. I want to do some jazzing."
"How you going to get up here?" said the tall boy. "With your bony ass?"
Stern wanted to tell him not to make fun of the young Greek's missing
leg, but the tree swings had intimidated him and he had no desire to
run up against the tall boy's explosive wiriness. Dropping easily to
the ground, the tall boy flung the wheelchair on ahead of him and
said, "Did you see me up there? Aren't I one helluva crazy bastard? I
don't care what happens to me."
Stern said, "You were very good up there," and the boy said, "But
sometimes everything stops in me. I lay in bed for six months and I
can't get out. My kid sister brings me soup. It's in my veins. That's
what I'm in here for."
There were no guards at the gate, but as they rolled toward it, Stern
had a sudden fear that Lennie had been watching them all along; the
instant they passed the gate, he would have them picked up in trucks
and initiate punitive measures.
"They don't like you to go through this gate," Stern said, but the
Greek boy, wheeling right through, said, "I got to hop on something.
Then I'm happy." And Stern raced along after the pair. The three of
them traveled seven blocks in darkness, and when they came to a small
bar and grill the blond boy said, "I can taste that brew already. I
can't go no more than a few days without a few brews." The Puerto
Rican girl was waiting for them in a booth, and it seemed to Stern
that she was more like Tierney than ever, Tierney after a session with
two longshoremen who'd been paid to rough her up a little, not to kill
her but to change her face around a little. She wore a bulging black
sweater, and her paper-white teeth were chipped a little. Stern, drunk
with the danger of having run away from the Home, wondered what her
teeth would be like on sections of his body; perhaps they would nibble
erotically at him in the style of some primeval creature of the Puerto
Rican rain forests.
"And so ends my solitude," she said as the blond boy slid in beside her.
Stern, a weakened, dropping, off-balance feeling coming over him as
a result of her literary flourish, took a seat across the table. The
Greek boy swung close, chewing on his nails, examining the chrome and
red leather décor. "This place stinks," he said. "We got better places
in East Harlem."
"Get this," said the blond boy, poking the girl in the ribs and winking
at Stern. "You know what a kiss is? An upper persuasion for a lower
invasion." The girl pecked at his ear with her chipped teeth and said,
"Forever play the jester." The proprietor, a tall, toplike man who
looked out on the street as he spoke, came over and asked, "What'll it
be?"
"We're just in here nice," said the blond boy. "We came in here nice
and all we want to do is drink nice. Nobody bothers us, we don't bother
nobody. Right, Mr. Stern? Didn't we come in here nice?"
"Yes," said Stern, smiling at the man, feeling the air charge up and
wanting to stop whatever was about to happen. The brocade of tenderness
appeared suddenly to girdle his stomach. He was not sure he could
take any trouble, and he imagined himself collapsing and having to be
carried back to the Home by his two friends, the Puerto Rican girl
walking contemptuously behind, aware now that Stern had the least
romantic disease of all.
"Brews all around," the blond boy said, his mood suddenly sweetening.
When the proprietor returned to the bar, the blond boy squeezed the
girl's breasts and said, "How they hangin', doll?"
"Hey, George--motorboat," he said, waggling his head from side to side
against her breasts and making a droning sound in his throat.
"I don't go for that," said the Greek boy, eating deep down on his
nails and leaning forward on his wheelchair, as though watching a tense
horse race. "I like to do some real jazzing."
The girl sat patiently through this, running her fingers through the
blond boy's hair. "The physical side," she said to Stern, who nodded
back at her, his heart in his throat, as though he too considered
breast-nuzzling a bore.
The proprietor brought the beers and said, "Pay now." The blond boy
said, "Remember what I said when we came in? I said we're coming in
here nice. Nobody pushes us around, we don't do any bumping either. Now
you come over and you say pay now."
"It's a house rule," said the proprietor, staring out the window.
"Everybody pays now." Stern, the brocade tightening around his stomach
and wanting to do something, put down two dollars and the proprietor
took it. The Greek boy said, "You think you got such a hot place here.
This place stinks." He spit on the floor and the proprietor went back
to the bar.
"That's what I was telling you," the blond boy said to Stern with a
pleading compassion in his voice. "Nobody gives you freedom. You come
into a place nice, you know, and you just want a few brews, and look
what happens."
"He thinks just because he's got a fancy place he can give you shit,"
said the Greek boy. "I spit on his ass."
The blond boy's mood suddenly changed and he took hold of one of the
girl's breasts again. "Good set, huh, Mr. Stern?" And Stern nodded
sweetly in agreement, looking apologetically at the girl, as though he
was only going along with this line of conversation to be polite and
really never thought of such things.
"What about the dancin'?" the girl asked, looking over at the jukebox.
"Does my love feel a tango within him?"
"Dancing, shit," said the blond boy. He looked over at the proprietor,
who was rinsing glasses, and said, "He comes over here again, we get
him. You can be nice up to a certain point."
"He thinks he has a fancy place," said the boy in the wheelchair. "I'll
cut his balls."
Stern, his stomach pumping, wanted to say, "Wait. No fighting. You
have other things, but I have an ulcer, the kind of thing you shouldn't
get excited with. What if I get hit in it and get another new one?"
When the proprietor came over to the table, the blond boy arranged his
fingers like two donkey's ears and stuck them swiftly in the man's
eyes. The proprietor said, "I can't see now," holding his eyes, and the
Greek boy grabbed his hair and yanked the man's head down on his lap,
saying, "I ought to cut your balls." Then he held the man by the hair
in a bent-over position and the tall, blond boy began to kick at the
man's upper legs, the kicks making sharp, fresh cracking sounds, like
new baseballs off a bat. Stern, who had stood by doing nothing, wanted
to say, "Stop, you're going too far. The hair stuff wasn't so bad, but
now you can do spinal injury." But a current began snapping through
him and he looked for something to do. There was one other person in
the bar, a small man with a toothbrush mustache who was eating a heavy
soup. Stern ran over and grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms.
"I'm not in this," said the man.
"That's all right," said Stern, ecstatic over being in the fight, his
stomach free and easy. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if he
could be transported in this very condition to the kike man's front
porch, the current snapping through him, the same excited sweat in
his arms. He was certain he would be able to fight him and not feel
a single blow, and for an instant he thought of jumping in a cab and
speeding back to his house, gritting his teeth to preserve the mood.
The cab fare would be $150 or so, but it would be worth it. But what if
the current then began to fade, the sweat dry up, and he found himself
nearing the man's house with a growing fright, worrying about being hit
in the ulcer? He saw that he would have to get there instantaneously or
it would not work.
After many kicks, the proprietor said, "That's enough," and the blond
boy, as though waiting for him to signal with those very words, said,
"Let's cut," shoving his wheelchaired friend through the door. Stern
said, "I'm letting you go now," to the mustached soup eater and ran
out the door after the girl, looking back at the proprietor. He was
relieved to see that the man was standing; it seemed to him that only
when people were on the floor might there be police involvement. The
quartet ran through blackened, neatly shrubbed residential streets, and
Stern wondered how running was for the ulcer. Would jogging up and down
disengage it and cause it to take residence in another part of him? He
was suddenly struck by the incongruity of the quartet--a grenadelike,
blond boy with strange vein problems; a wheelchaired Greek; a heavy Jew
with ulcer-filled stomach; and a strange, Tierney-like girl who spoke
in literary flourishes. And yet they were comrades of a sort and he
was glad to be with them, to be doing things with them, to be running
and bellowing to the sky at their sides; he was glad their lives were
tangled up together. It was so much better than being a lone Jew
stranded on a far-off street, your exit blocked by a heavy-armed kike
hater in a veteran's jacket.
They slowed down after a while and Stern put his arm around the girl's
waist, as though he had been unable to stop and was using her to steady
himself. Her neck was wet from the exercise, and the pungent dime-store
fragrance of her hair brought him close to a delighted faint.
"Hey, you grabbin' my girl," said the blond boy, and, with a straight
face, whipped a blue-veined, grenadelike fist into Stern's ulcer,
stopping at the last possible instant and saying "Pow!" instead of
landing the blow. Then he threw his head back and howled, saying, "You
grab my girl, I got to give you one. Pow, pow, pow!"
"Suivez-moi to my petite habitat," said the girl, going up ahead of the
group. "And a young girl shall lead them."
Not sure whether further waist encirclements were permissible, Stern
walked beside her, and she said, "I used to work in a hardware store.
You meet a princely selection of spooks there, it being near the main
drag. One such spook came in one morning and said his friend wanted
to spend the evening with me for $140. I asked him where yon friend
was. He said he was across the street in a building watching the two
of us with a telescope and would come down if I assented. I replied in
the negative, of course. I'll entertain a man, to be sure, but not a
telescoping type. You do agree there are many spooks in this land of
ours." Stern, flattered that she had told him an anecdote, was not sure
what to reply and decided he would tell her about his ulcer, testing
her reaction.
"I've got something inside me. That's why I'm at the Home. I'm not sure
how all this running around will affect me."
"The shits," she said. "I know them. The shits are a chore." She
whirled around now and slid her fingers under the shirt of the tall,
blond boy. "Does the darling midnight fool feel a cha-cha within him?"
she asked. The blond boy took one hand off the wheelchair, tapped the
underside of her breast, and said, "Flippety-flippety. Hey, Stern, you
see that? Flippety-flippety."
The girl led them to the last house at the edge of a dead-end street;
a sign saying "Tina's Beauty Salon" was in the center of the lawn
alongside a thin and graceful tree. It had a white luminescent
stripe across the bottom of its slender trunk, making it look like a
thoroughbred horse's taped ankle.
"My queenly habitat," said the girl, and led them through the front
door and down a long corridor with lined-up rows of hair-drying
machines. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and guided them
now into a small, sparely furnished room with a single bed and one
wall papered with Broadway show posters. The lamplight within was
warm, making her features seem smoother and heightening the Tierney
resemblance; Stern, weakened now by the bulge of her black sweater, the
things she had been saying, and the show posters, wondered how it would
be getting a divorce, being bled financially, and starting up anew with
the Puerto Rican girl in this very room.
The girl flicked on a victrola, putting a finger to her lips, and said,
"I'm just a tattered tenant here." She closed her eyes and swayed to
the music as though it were a treatment; her body lagged a trifle
behind the beat, in the slow-motion style of the feebleminded children
she watched each day. Holding out her arms to the blond boy, she said,
"Step inside this delightful sound." The blond boy came over, pinched
her skirt, and said, "Check your oil." Then he pointed to the Greek
boy, who sat staring out at the stars, rubbing his hands as though
washing them in a sink. "Dance with George," said the blond boy. "Hey,
George, dance with the broad." The Greek boy, his back to the others,
a lawyer deciding a case, said, "I don't like dancing. I came out with
you to do some jazzing."
The tall boy suddenly grabbed the Greek's wheelchair and pushed it out
the door, saying, "I got an idea." Inside the beauty parlor room, he
picked up a cigarette holder, put on a hairnet, and sat beneath a hair
dryer. "Hey, look at me," he hollered back to Stern and the girl. "I'm
an old broad."
The girl closed the door and said, "Boredom sets in swiftly." Still
swaying to the music, she asked Stern, "What is your work?" Thrilled
by her sudden interest and loving the way she had asked the question,
Stern said, "Product labels. There's some writing to it, only not
literary." Dancing with closed eyes and lagging behind the beat,
she said, "Someday I, too, shall write a volume. I shall include the
sweetness and bile of my life." She stopped dancing now and said, "One
of the spooks at the hardware store asked me to do some modeling.
Bearded chap. Does figure work mean you work in the altogether, or does
one get to keep a doodad on?"
"I don't get into that in my work," said Stern. "I don't like the
sound of what you said, though. I have some friends who are legitimate
photographers."
She changed the record to a fox-trot now and, taking off her skirt,
said, "How would I look adorning magazines?"
Stern stopped breathing, and it suddenly came home to him that they
were only a mile or so from the Grove Rest Home and that he was
supposed to be undergoing treatment. He was certain that he would be
caught, and he tried to imagine what untold horrors would await him if
he were brought before the Home committee. At the very least they would
throw him out, marking his records so that he would be banned from
other rest homes when, at some later date, new illnesses came on. Then
he imagined one gentile on the committee smiling thinly and saying,
"No, no, let's let him stay," and then seeing to it that he was given
a daily allotment of tarnished pills so that his stomach sprouted an
entire forest of ulcers.
She put her hand on her hips in a terrible thirties pose and then took
off her sweater, saying, "Oh yes, the bosom culture; I'd forgotten."
Her breasts poured forward, capped by slanting, evil, Puerto Rican
nipples, and Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at that very
moment, sad-eyed and chattering with need, was hoisting her own sweater
above her head in the rear seat of a limousine, that there was a
strange sexual balance wheel at work, and that for every indiscretion
of Stern's his wife would commit one too, at best only seconds later.
Like a discharged mortar shell, the tall, blond boy, a salivated look
of rage on his face, charged into the room now and said, "Oh, you
lookin' at my girl's nips, eh?" He shoved Stern against the wall and
shot his fist at Stern's neck, stopping once again at the final instant
and saying "Fwot" instead of landing the blow. Then he became convulsed
with laughter, doubling up on the bed and howling, "I got you again."
The boy stood up then and kissed the girl's nipples with loud, smacking
sounds and said to the Greek, "Good set, eh?" Stern, feeling somehow
that the girl's breasts were going to get hurt, walked over to her and
said, "We were discussing something and she was demonstrating it." The
tall boy said softly, "Oh, that's all right. I just like to diddle her
boobs a little. George and me will take ten outside and kid around
with those dryers." Then, with increasing kindness, he said, "You know
the way you say things? Like what you just said? You were _discussing_
something. That's nice. The way you have of saying all the thoughts in
your head."
Stern noticed now for the first time that the boy's T-shirt had holes
in it, and he felt very sorry for possibly having taken something away
from him. What if his veins acted up and he had to spend six months in
a room, unable to swing from trees and make believe he was going to hit
Stern in the ulcer?
"We can all stay in here and play around," said Stern, but the blond
boy walked out, saying, "That's all right, Mr. Stern, sir." To the boy
in the wheelchair, Stern said, "You can stick around," but the Greek
youth, rubbing his hands, said, "No, I don't feel like it tonight. You
know, some nights you're just not in the mood for jazzing." He wheeled
himself out of the room, closing the door behind him, and the girl
put her arms around Stern's neck and said, "Sweet riddance. Now, my
knighted author, will you be with me on the highest of all levels?"
Minutes previous, when she had taken off her clothes, Stern had planned
merely to stare at her and fix her in his memory. Perhaps he would tap
her behind and feel her breasts in the style of the other boys and then
race back across the streets to the Grove Rest Home. It seemed to him
that somehow if he did more, the Home would definitely hear of it, his
treatment would be disrupted at an early stage, and he would be doomed
to walk the streets forever with a permanent ulcer blooming between
his ribs. And, of course, if he were to go further, within minutes
his own wife, skirt gaping and great eyes confident, would sink back
comfortably on the rear cushions of some strange convertible.
He waited for an outraged knock at the door, the clatter of Lennie's
machine-shop legs, but nothing came and he fitted his hands over the
girl's nylon-covered buttocks, thinking that he had never held a
Puerto Rican behind before and that maybe it _was_ a little different.
She took his ear between her chipped white teeth, as though she were
an animal pawing meat, and said, "Wondrous author of mine, explore
forbidden avenues with deponent thine."
She guided him to the bed, did a dipping thing to make herself nude,
and said, "Honest, do you think I'm sensitive?"
"Yes," said Stern, who loved the things she said.
She pulled him to her and said, "Then thrill my secret fibers." She put
a contraceptive on him and said, "Now, honey, don't spoil it. Really,
let's do a good one." It bothered Stern that she had the contraceptive
on hand, but he liked the way she managed it, and the idea of her
having one ready suddenly threw him into a frenzy. After a moment, she
whispered, "We are as pages in a book of sonnets. Really give it to
me." He said, "All right," and after a few seconds she rose and said,
a little irritatedly, "Oh, you thrilled me, all right. You really
thrilled me." She got into her clothes, and then the irritation passed,
and she perched on the bed beside him and said, "Such loveliness I have
never known." Her bare brown Puerto Rican knees excited Stern and he
wanted her again. He had loved the things she whispered to him and the
sting of her teeth pulling on his flesh like meat. "Tell me of your
literary prowess," she said.
The door opened and the blond boy came in and said, "We're tired of
sitting around out there."
Stern looked out in the corridor and saw the Greek boy's wheelchair
against the window. He went outside to him and found the boy crying.
"My leg is gone," he said. "I ain't got two fucking legs any more."
Stern took the boy's head against his waist and rubbed his neck, trying
to think of something to tell him. But there was nothing. What could he
say? That the leg would grow back again? "Some people have things even
worse than legs in their stomachs," he said finally. He wheeled the
boy inside the room, where the girl sat perched on the bed. The tall,
blond boy picked up an extra-long broomstick handle and said, "Hey,
George, let's give her a ride." He quickly slid the broomstick between
the girl's legs, and the boy in the wheelchair, getting the idea, dried
his eyes, wheeled close, and caught the other end, so that they had
her straddling the stick as though she were on a fence. They began to
lift her up and down on the broomstick, the two of them howling at
the ceiling, while the girl shouted, "Lemme off, you bastards." Stern
shouted, "You'll hurt her down there," but she looked so awkward, he
stopped loving her immediately. When she cursed at them, Stern looked
at her and said, "I can't do anything."
"Hey, Mr. Stern, keep her up there," said the blond boy, and Stern
took the Greek boy's end and tossed her up and down a few times,
saying, "I'm going to do this a little, too."
They finally let her down, and for an instant, straightening her skirt,
she smoothed her hair and pretended nothing had happened. "Let me tell
you further of my book," she said to Stern. But, after seeing her on
the pole, the thought of her terrible Puerto Rican writing disgusted
him and he said, "No literary stuff now."
She bent over then, holding her crotch, and said, "Ooh, you really
hurt me down there, you cruddy bastards." Stern felt good that she
had addressed all three of them, not excluding him, and it thrilled
him to be flying out of her apartment with his new friends, all three
howling and smacking each other with laughter at the pole episode. He
wanted to be with them, not with her. He needed buddies, not a terrible
Puerto Rican girl. He needed close friends to stand around a piano with
and sing the Whiffenpoof song, arms around each other, perhaps before
shipping out somewhere to war. If his dad got sick, he needed friends
to stand in hospital corridors with him and grip his arm. He needed
guys to stand back to back with him in bars and take on drunks. These
were tattered, broken boys, one in a wheelchair, but they were buddies.
They skidded across the lawn, wildly recalling the night's events.