Beggarman, Thief (29 page)

I’m afraid that in the to-do after I got beaten up I forgot to keep my promise about sending you the names of some of the people you wanted to know about who might give you information about your father. There’s Johnny Heath, of course, who chartered the
Clothilde
with his wife. I don’t remember if you were already on board at that time or not. Then there’re Mr. and Mrs. Goodhart, who also chartered the ship in different seasons. I’m writing the addresses on the enclosed sheet of paper. If you want to go as far back as when your father was the age that you are now, there was a boy—now a man, of course—called Claude Tinker, in Port Philip, who was a partner of your father in some of his escapades. The Tinker family, I have heard, is still in Port Philip. Then there’s a man named Theodore Boylan, who must be quite old by now, but who had intimate ties with our family.

I only saw your father fight professionally once—against a colored boy named Virgil Walters, and perhaps he would have something to remember. Your father had a manager called Schultz and I found him once through
Ring
Magazine when I wanted to get in touch with your father.

If other names occur to me I’ll send them along to you. I’m sorry you couldn’t come to visit me this summer and hope you can manage it another time.

I’m enclosing a little gift to start the new school year with. If by any chance you need more, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Fondly,

Rudolph

Wesley folded the letter and put it back into the envelope, as he had with Bunny’s letter. He
writes
with an anchor up his ass, Wesley thought. He
isn’t
like that, there’s just a wall between what he is and what he sounds like. Wesley wished he could like Uncle Rudolph more than he did.

He gave the two letters to Jimmy when Jimmy came in to help sweep up. Jimmy was the other delivery boy. He was a black, the same age as Wesley. Jimmy kept the photograph of his father in boxing trunks that the lady from
Time
had given him and whatever letters Wesley got, because Wesley’s mother went through everything in his room at least twice a week looking for signs of sin and whatever else she could find. Letters from his uncle and Kate and Bunny would be incriminating evidence of a giant conspiracy by everybody to rob her of her son’s love, an emotion she spoke about often. Her occasional outbursts of affection were hard to bear. She insisted upon kissing him and hugging him and calling him her sweet baby boy and telling him that if he only got a haircut he would be a beautiful young man and if he would accept the joys of religion he would make his mother blissfully happy and there wasn’t anything she and Mr. Kraler wouldn’t do for him. It wasn’t an act and Wesley knew his mother
did
love him and want him to be happy—but in her way, not his. Her demonstrativeness left him uneasy and embarrassed. He thought of Kate with longing.

He never spoke about his mother or Mr. Kraler to Jimmy, although Jimmy was the only friend Wesley had in town. He had avoided all other overtures, except that of Mrs. Wertham, and that didn’t really count. He didn’t want to feel sorry at leaving anything behind when he departed from Indianapolis.

He didn’t feel like going home for dinner, first of all because he knew the meal would be lousy and second because the house, which had been bad enough before, had been as gloomy as the grave since Mr. Kraler had gotten the telegram saying his son Max had been killed in Vietnam. They were expecting the body home for burial any day now and the time of waiting for it had been like one long funeral.

He invited Jimmy to have dinner with him. “I can splurge tonight,” he told Jimmy. “My rich uncle came through again.”

They ate in a little restaurant near the supermarket where you could get a steak dinner for one fifty and where the owner didn’t ask for proof you were of age when you ordered a beer.

Jimmy wanted to be a rock musician and sometimes he took Wesley over to his house and played his clarinet for him with one of his sisters who played the piano, while his other sister brought in the beers. Jimmy’s sisters treated Jimmy as though he were a precious object, and anybody Jimmy liked they couldn’t do enough for. There was no question of anybody’s robbing them of Jimmy’s love or theirs for him. Jimmy’s crowded warm house, filled with the presence of the two pretty, laughing girls, was another place in Indianapolis that Wesley liked. Indianapolis, with its factories and pale tides of workmen morning and night and its flat expanses of identical houses and its littered streets, made Antibes seem like a suburb of a city in heaven.

Wesley didn’t tell his mother about Jimmy. She was polite with blacks, but she believed in their keeping their distance, she said. It had something to do with being a Mormon.

After dinner, he remembered to tell Jimmy that from now on he’d appreciate it if Jimmy would make the deliveries to Mrs. Wertham’s house. He didn’t say why and Jimmy didn’t ask him. That was another good thing about Jimmy—he didn’t ask foolish questions.

He walked home slowly. There was an unspoken rule that if he got home by nine o’clock there wouldn’t be any hysterical scenes about his tomcatting around town, disgracing his family, like his father. The usual routine was bad enough, but the scenes, especially late at night, tore at his nerves and made it almost impossible for him to get to sleep after them. He had thought again and again of just taking off, but he wanted to give his mother every chance possible. There had to be
something
there. Once, his father had loved her.

When he got home, Mr. Kraler was sobbing in the living room and holding his son’s framed photograph. The picture had been taken with Max Kraler in a private’s uniform. He was a thin-faced, sad-eyed boy, who looked as though he knew he was going to be killed before he was twenty-one. Wesley’s mother took him into the hallway and whispered that Mr. Kraler had received notice that Max’s body was going to arrive in two days and had spent the afternoon making funeral arrangements. “Be nice to him, please,” she said. “He loved his boy. He wants you to get a haircut tomorrow and go with me to buy a new dark suit for the funeral.”

“My hair’s okay, Ma,” Wesley said. “I’m not going to cut it.”

“At a time like this,” his mother said, still whispering. “You might just this once—to show respect for the dead.”

“I can show as much respect for the dead with my hair the way it is.”

“You won’t even do a little thing like this to please your mother?” She began to cry, too.

“I like the way my hair is,” Wesley said. “Nobody but you and him …” he gestured toward the living room, “ever bothers me about it.”

“You’re a stubborn, hard boy,” she said, letting the tears course down her cheeks. “You never give an inch, do you?”

“I do when it makes sense,” he said.

“Mr. Kraler won’t let me buy you a new suit with that hair.”

“So I’ll go to the funeral in my old suit,” Wesley said. “Max won’t care.”

“That’s a sick joke,” she wept.

“I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“That old suit and that wild-Indian hair will make us all ashamed in church.”

“Okay. I won’t go to church. And I won’t go to the cemetery. I never even
met
Max. What difference does it make?”

“Mother,” Mr. Kraler called from the living room, “can you come in here for a minute?”

“Coming, dear,” Teresa called. She glared harshly at Wesley, then slapped him, hard.

Wesley didn’t react, but merely stood there in the hallway. His mother went into the living room and he went upstairs to his room.

They left it at that. When Max Kraler was buried, Wesley was delivering groceries.

Corporal Healey, who had also served in Vietnam but had not known Mr. Kraler’s son, accompanied the body of the boy to Indianapolis. Mr. Kraler, who was a veteran of the Korean War, invited the corporal as a comrade in arms to stay in the house instead of going to a hotel. The night after the funeral Wesley had to share his bed with Healey, because Mr. Kraler’s married daughter, Doris, who lived in Chicago, was using the guest room across the hall. Doris was a small, mousy young woman who looked, Wesley thought, like Mr. Kraler.

Healey was a short, likable man, about twenty-three, who had a Purple Heart with two clusters on his blouse. Mr. Kraler, who had been a clerk in the quartermaster’s in Tokyo during the Korean War, had talked Healey’s ear off all day about
his
experiences as a soldier, and Healey had been polite, but had signaled to Wesley that he would like to break away. In a pause in Mr. Kraler’s conversation Healey had stood up and said he’d like to take a little walk and asked if they’d mind letting Wesley go with him so he wouldn’t get lost. Mr. Kraler, one soldier to another, said, “Of course, Corporal,” and Teresa had nodded. She hadn’t said a word to Wesley since the scene in the hallway and Wesley was grateful to Healey for getting him out of the house.

“Phew!” Healey said as they walked down the street, “that’s heavy duty in there. What’s that sister like, that Doris?”

“I don’t know,” Wesley said. “I met her for the first time yesterday.”

“She keeps giving me the eye,” Healey said. “Do you think she means it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Sometimes those plain-looking little dolls are powerhouses when it comes to putting out,” Healey said. “You wouldn’t object if I gave it a try, would you?”

“Why should I?” Wesley asked. “Just be careful. My mother patrols the house like a watchdog.”

“We’ll see how the situation develops,” Healey said. He was from Virginia and his speech was soft and drawled. “That Mr. Kraler is something. The way he talks it was hand-to-hand combat every day in Tokyo. And he kept eating up all the gory details about how I was wounded. One thing for sure, I’m not joining the American Legion. I had my war and I don’t want to hear word one about that war or anybody else’s war. Where can we get a couple of beers?”

“It’s not far from here,” Wesley said. “I guessed you could use a drink.”

“You’d think that if a fella came along with the body,” Healey complained, “there’d be a little nip of something to cheer everybody up a bit. Not even a cup of coffee, for Christ’s sake.”

“They’re Mormons.”

“That must be some sorrowful religion,” Healey said. “I go to Mass every Sunday I can, but I don’t spit in the face of Creation. After all, God made whiskey, beer, wine—Christ, He even made coffee and tea. What do they think He made them for?”

“Ask Mr. Kraler.”

“Yeah,” Healey said mournfully.

They sat in a booth at the restaurant where Wesley had eaten dinner with Jimmy and drank beer. Wesley had explained to Healey that was the one place he was sure he wouldn’t be called on being under eighteen.

“You’re a big kid,” Healey said. “It must be a nice feeling, being big, nobody picks on you much. I tell you something, a guy my size sure gets his share of shit.”

“There’re a lot of ways of getting picked on,” Wesley said, “that got nothing to do with size.”

“Yeah,” Healey said. “I noticed Mr. Kraler and your mother aren’t all warm loving-kindness with you.”

Wesley shrugged. “I grin and bear it.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen.”

“You could pass for twenty-one.”

“If necessary,” Wesley said.

“What’re you going to do about the draft when you’re eighteen?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Wesley said.

“You want some advice from someone who’s been there and almost didn’t make it back?” Healey said. “No matter what you do, don’t give ’em your name and let them give you a number. It ain’t fun, Wesley, it ain’t fun at all.”

“What can you do?”

“Anything. You just don’t want to let them get you in the army. You never saw such a lot of hopeless, disgusted men in your life, getting shot at, getting blown up on mines, coming down with every kind of disease and jungle rot you can think of, and nobody knowing what he’s doing there.… Believe it or not, Wesley, I enlisted.
Enlisted,
for God’s sake!”

“My father told me once,” Wesley said, “don’t ever volunteer for any wars.”

“Your father knew what he was talking about,” Healey said. “The army sure knows how to take the patriotism out of a man and it wasn’t enemy action that did it for me, either, boy. The final cherry on the whipped cream was when a pal of mine and myself got off the plane in San Francisco, all gussied up in parade dress, with our ribbons and all. There were two pretty chicks walking in front of us at the airport and we hurried a little and caught up with them and I said, ‘What’re you girls doing tonight?’ They stopped and looked at me as though I was a snake. They didn’t say nary a word, but the girl nearest me spit at me, right in the face, just as calm as could be. Imagine that. Spit! Then they turned around and walked away from us.” Healey shook his head. “We were home from the wars just ten minutes, with our Purple Hearts, and that was the welcome we got. Hail the conquering hero!” He laughed sourly. “You don’t want to put your ass on the line for people like that, Wesley. Just keep on the move, float around, so they can’t put their hands on you. The best place to get lost, the guys say, is Europe. Paris is the number one spot. Even if you have to register at the embassy, they don’t take the trouble to smoke you out.”

Talk around the campfire, Wesley thought. Old battles and loving thoughts of home. “I’ve been in Europe,” he said. “I can speak French pretty good.”

“I wouldn’t wait too long if I was you, Wesley. You just make sure you’re in gay Paree on your eighteenth birthday, pal,” Healey said and waved for two more beers. The coffin he had accompanied to Indianapolis had been draped with the flag at the church and at the graveside. Mr. Kraler had the flag and had said at dinner that he was going to hang it in Max’s room, which was Wesley’s now.

The house was dark when they reached it, so there was something to be thankful for. If his mother had been up and smelled the beer on them, there would have been tears and a scene.

They went upstairs quietly and were just starting to get undressed when there was a little knock on the door and the door opened and Doris came in. She was barefooted and was wearing a nightgown that you could see through. She smiled at them and put her finger to her lips as she carefully closed the door behind her. “I heard you boys come in and I thought it might be nice to have a little gabfest. To get better acquainted, so to speak,” she said. “Do either of you have a cigarette by any chance?” She talked in a mincing, self-conscious way, as though she had used baby talk until she was through with high school. She had droopy breasts, Wesley saw, though he tried not to keep looking, and a fat, low-slung ass. If I looked like that, he thought, I wouldn’t go around dressed like that, except in total darkness. But Healey was smiling widely and there was a new gleam in his eye. He had already taken his shirt off and was naked from the waist up. He didn’t have much of a build, either, Wesley noted.