Max Wyman woke raving with the chuck horrors. There was somebody there
to hand him candy bars, sweet lemonade, lump sugar. There was somebody
to shove him easily back into the pallet of rags when he tried to
stumble forth in a hunt for booze. On the second day he realized that
it was an old man whose face looked gray and paralyzed. His name was T.
G. Pendelton, he said.
After a week, he let Max Wyman take little walks about their part of
Riverside--but not by night. "We've got some savage people here," he
said. "They'd murder you for a pint. The women are worse. If one calls
to you, don't go. You'll wind up dumped through a manhole into the
Hudson. Poor folk."
"You're _sorry_ for them?" Wyman asked, startled. It was a new idea to
him. Since Buffalo, he had never been sorry for anybody. Something awful
had happened there, some terrible betrayal ... he passed his bony hand
across his forehead. He didn't want to think about it.
"Would I live here if I weren't?" T. G. asked him. "Sometimes I can help
them. There's nobody else to help them. They're old and sick and they
don't fit anywhere. That's why they're savage. You're young--the only
young man I've ever seen in Riveredge. There's so much outside for the
young. But when you get old it sometimes throws you."
"The Goddammed Syndic," Wyman snarled, full of hate.
T. G. shrugged. "Maybe it's too easy for sick old people to get booze.
They lose somebody they spent a life with and it throws them. People
harden into a pattern. They always had fun, they think they always will.
Then half of the pattern's gone and they can't stand it, some of them.
You got it early. What was the ringing bell?"
Wyman collapsed into the bay of the I-beam as if he'd been kicked in the
stomach. A wave of intolerable memory swept over him. A ringing bell, a
wobbling pendulum, a flashing light, the fair face of his betrayer, the
hateful one of Hogan, stirred together in a hell brew. "Nothing," he
said hoarsely, thinking that he'd give his life for enough booze to
black him out. "Nothing."
"You kept talking about it," T. G. said. "Was it real?"
"It couldn't have been," Wyman muttered. "There aren't such things. No.
There was her and that Syndic and that louse Hogan. I don't want to talk
about it."
"Suit yourself."
He did talk about it later, curiously clouded though it was. The years
in Buffalo. The violent love affair with Inge. The catastrophic scene
when he found her with Regan, king-pin mobster. The way he felt turned
inside-out, the lifetime of faith in the Syndic behind him and the
lifetime of a faith in Inge ahead of him, both wrecked, the booze, the
flight from Buffalo to Erie, to Pittsburgh, to Tampa, to New York. And
somehow, insistently, the ringing bell, the wobbling pendulum and the
flashing light that kept intruding between episodes of reality.
T. G. listened patiently, fed him, hid him when infrequent patrols went
by. T. G. never told him his own story, but a bloated woman who lived
with a yellow-toothed man in an abandoned storage tank did one day, her
voice echoing from the curving, windowless walls of corrugated plastic.
She said T. G. had been an alky chemist, reasonably prosperous,
reasonably happy, reasonably married. His wife was the faithful kind and
he was not. With unbelievable slyness she had dulled the pain for years
with booze and he had never suspected. They say she had killed herself
after one frightful week-long debauche in Riveredge. T. G. came down to
Riveredge for the body and returned after giving it burial and drawing
his savings from the bank. He had never left Riveredge since.
"Worsh'p the grun' that man walks on," the bloated woman mumbled. "Nev'
gets mad, nev' calls you hard names. Give y'a bottle if y' need it. Talk
to y' if y' blue. Worsh'p that man."
Max Wyman walked from the storage tank, sickened. T. G.'s charity
covered that creature and him.