Dreadful Summit (2 page)

Then Al Judge walked up to the clear space where the bar ended, and I saw why he carried a cane. He was lame in one leg; not much, but enough so he rocked a little when he walked. He pointed the cane at my father and said, ‘Come out here, LaMain.'

My father looked at the guys standing behind the bar, but they just looked back at him. He ran a hand over his forehead, and even from where I was I could see his hand shaking. Then he turned to look at me, and he wasn't like my father at all. Once he used to know how everything should be done, and he wasn't afraid of anything, but now he was just standing there and shaking.

I started to get up, but Sam Schwartz pointed his finger at me and Flanagan grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down into the chair again. In my heart I was just as glad. Maybe I could have grabbed up the bottle and gotten in one lick before I went down. Maybe I could have broken off the neck of the bottle and shoved the sharp part into Al Judge's face before he or Sam Schwartz got to me, but I didn't really want to. I don't like fights or getting hurt. I try to talk my way out, and if I can't, I'm a good runner. I'm skinny but I'm tall and I can run.

So I wanted to do something, but I didn't want to, and inside of me I could feel I was getting ready to vomit. I locked it back and all that came up was a big belch, and a taste of coke in my mouth. But nobody thought it was funny. Nobody even looked at me.

And all this time Al Judge kept his cane pointed right at my father, and then, very slowly, my father walked down to the end of the bar, and came out, and stood in front of him. Al Judge put the cane down and leaned on it.

'Take off your shirt, LaMain,' he said. ‘I want to see some skin.'

‘Before God, Mr Judge!' my father started to say, but Al Judge just laughed short and sharp like a seal barking.

‘Before me,' he said.

My father looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. Then all of a sudden they started spilling out of mine and my glasses misted right over so that everything was blurred. I didn't even try to clean them. Only through the fog I could see my father slip the apron loop over his head, then take off his shirt. There was a big hole in the chest of his underwear and he held the shirt in front so it wouldn't show. Al Judge shook his head. ‘I said
skin.
'

My father folded up the shirt carefully and put it on the bar. Then he pulled off the underwear top and stood there with his skin all sweaty in the light.

‘Get on your hands and knees, LaMain,' said Al Judge. ‘Let's get it over with.'

Outside the plate glass in front, I could see a lot of people pushing and shoving at each other. Some even pushed at the door, but the delivery-man I didn't know just snapped the lock and stood there like everybody else, stone quiet.

And then Al Judge lifted the cane and my father yelled so that it felt like a needle in my eardrums. I shut my eyes quick, and I knew I was ready to go out cold. Flanagan must have known too. He shoved my head so hard down on the table that my nose twisted under me and my whole face pained. But it couldn't drown out the slam of that cane and my father's voice bubbling out from him.

I was out all right. Because the next thing I heard was a whirling roar of noise that steadied down to a bunch of people all pushing around my father who was laid out on his belly on the floor with his head pushing up against the bar.

Flanagan was next to him on his knees. He had a bottle of whisky open and he was pouring it all over my father's back, and my father was alive all right because he was groaning.

The funniest thing was when I could sit up straight and the whole room stopped rocking around, I thought it was a dream. I mean, my father must have come out from behind the bar and slipped on a wet spot, or maybe somebody took a sneak punch at him like had happened once before. But he couldn't have been down on his knees with Al Judge caning him.

He couldn't, you see.

But when I felt how my glasses were all twisted where my head was shoved down on the table, and my nose hurt, and my neck, from Flanagan's hand, I understood all the way through me it was real.

Then I knew I had to kill Al Judge.

Chapter Two

I'
LL
say this much for Flanagan. He wasn't much to look at, but he was a handy man to have around in a pinch. He was so old he didn't have much hair left, only a sort of dirty-white horseshoe around the top of his head. And instead of real teeth, he had a set of false ones, top and bottom, and when he got excited and started talking too fast they would come loose and start rattling around his mouth and he would have to shove them back with his finger.

On account of that, all the steadies liked to get him riled up so that his teeth would start slipping loose and then they would have a good laugh. He was easy to get riled up too, about almost everything. Especially women. He would start yelling about how women made all the trouble in the world, with his teeth hopping around in his mouth until he nearly swallowed them and all the customers would die laughing. Then he would shove the teeth back in place and take a
True Story
magazine into the toilet and sit there until he cooled off.

He always meant to write the story of his life for
True Story
magazine, because he said people would really learn something if they read it, but he never got around to it. Sometimes he got around to taking a pencil and starting off on a piece of paper, but he never got past writing ‘The Story of My Life', and then somebody would come in for a beer or a rye or something and he would have to go back to work. I guess he never did get around to it.

Nobody ever called him anything except Flanagan. He worked for my father from as far back as I can remember, but he wouldn't ever tell his first name. Even to my father. When my father made out government papers for Flanagan, like taxes or something, he just put down X. Flanagan. It never bothered my father any. He said every man is entitled to one secret anyhow.

Flanagan used to worry about me an awful lot when I was a kid, and it was his idea I ought to go down and join the C.Y.O. because all I did was hang around the back of the bar after school and read books. I read almost everything by Rudyard Kipling and Alexandre Dumas and good books like that, and I read all the comic books I could get and picture magazines. After a while I had to wear glasses from reading so much.

Flanagan worried about this and he took me to the C.Y.O. which is the Catholic Youth Organization on Seventeenth Street because they had sports and fresh air. But I couldn't see too good, and the kids didn't like me. I was always last pick on the teams, and I made believe I didn't care but finally I quit going.

Then Flanagan saw a sign in the subway that said how good the Boy Scouts were, and he took me down to the public-school basement and I joined the Boy Scouts. But the same thing happened at the Boy Scouts that happened at the C.Y.O., and besides I felt funny in the uniform because I was way taller than the other kids. The best thing they had was the
Boy Scout Handbook
which has plenty to read in it and a lot of pictures. I read it all through, and when I quit the Boy Scouts I kept the
Handbook
. I still like to read it.

After I quit the Boy Scouts, Flanagan got all steamed up about it and yelled at my father for an hour. My father just said sitting and reading was as good a way of staying out of trouble as he knew, so after that Flanagan never bothered me again.

Once he saw me just sitting and watching him set up beers, and he got annoyed and said, ‘What are you looking at?'

I said, ‘I'm just looking at the beers when you set them up. I like the way they look.'

Maybe he thought I was kidding him or something, because he looked at the beers and then he looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘What's there to like about the way they look!'

I said, ‘The way the head comes up from the bottom of the glass right after you fill it. It comes up so slow and easy and it rocks up and down until it comes all the way to the top.'

So all he said was, ‘You got stones in the head,' and he didn't bother about it any more. But I think he got to like it too, because now and then I would see him watching the glasses right after he filled them, and shaking his head.

Flanagan thought my father was just about the greatest man in the world. He would say to the regulars when my father wasn't around, ‘Andy LaMain is good-looking and smart and he has more brains than the Pope,' and if one of them asked why, Flanagan would say, ‘Because he keeps his mouth shut.'

Sometimes the guy would want to argue about this, but Flanagan would just say, ‘Aw, you got stones in the head,' and wait on somebody else.

It was all right with me because I thought the same way. My father was small, a head smaller than me, but he was nice-looking and he had a good build. He had smooth black hair just getting a little grey in front, and a little moustache he used to trim by himself every morning in front of the mirror. And Flanagan was right about my father keeping quiet. He was the quietest man I ever knew.

He could stand behind the bar all day, and never say more than hello to the regulars. If they got into a battle about politics or something, he would just go to the other end of the bar and read the paper. Mostly, if there wasn't trade, or just enough so Flanagan could handle it all right by himself, my father would stand looking out of the window.

He was like that with Frances too. She would walk along holding his arm and talking away a mile a minute, and then when she stopped he would say maybe one, two words, and that was all. I think he gave her the feeling sometimes that he wasn't listening, because once she got me alone up in the rooms.

‘Listen, George,' she said, ‘I want to ask you something and I want it to be just between you and me.'

‘Sure,' I said.

She was biting her thumbnail and looking at me like she was trying to figure out how to say it. ‘Look,' she finally said, ‘does your father ever talk about me? I mean, does he ever say
anything
about me when I'm not around?'

I said, ‘No,' and then she got scared and said, ‘Now remember, George, this was strictly between us.'

She didn't have to say that, because I wouldn't have told him anyhow. I mean, you didn't just go and tell my father anything until he asked you, and even then he didn't seem interested. About once a month he would say to me, ‘Is everything all right at school?' and I would say yes, it was, and in between those times he would just give me my allowance or tell me to get a haircut. I hardly ever talked to my father. I think I was a little afraid of him.

But when he was laying on the floor with Flanagan slopping whisky over him, everything turned upside down in me. I wasn't afraid of him any more. I didn't even have any use for him. A guy had walked in out of nowhere and handed him a licking and he just laid down and took it. With everybody looking at him he stripped down and took a beating like a kid. When I got up from the table and saw all the people pushing around and him laying there, all I thought of was if he couldn't handle Al Judge, I could.

I wasn't a kid any more. I was big. Bigger than anybody standing around there with their stupid mouths hanging open, because I knew something they didn't. I knew that I was going to kill Al Judge. Kill him right away so there wouldn't be any mistake about why it happened, but do it so smart and slick that nobody in the world could put the finger on me.

And the biggest thing. Al Judge had to know before he died why it was happening. He had to get down on his knees in front of me just the way the Jews used to get down in front of the Nazis when they were going to get theirs. And he had to slobber all over me before the finish. Maybe I would get him all undressed first so that's the way the cops would find him.

Just that idea made me feel bigger than the whole world. My glasses were bent anyhow. I stuck them in my pocket and I went over to the people standing there and started to shove them. ‘Get out of here,' I said; ‘Get out of here.'

One of them started to shove me back, but another one grabbed him. ‘It's only right,' he said. ‘Let them alone.'

So one by one, pushing against each other with their heads still turned back to see, they started to jam out of the door through the people who were crowded around there. The last guy still had some of his beer left and he drank it down before he went out. Then they were all gone and I pushed against the door to get it shut, and then I locked it. After that I pulled down the shade over the door and the big shade over the window, and we were all alone.

Chapter Three

F
IFTEEN
or sixteen is a bad age for a kid.

I don't only mean because of the way the juice percolates in him and makes him all jumpy about girls and stuff, even if that is one of the worst things about it. I mean when you're fifteen, sixteen, you're right in the middle of nowhere.

Take a little kid. He can be the worst little punk on the block, but everybody says, ‘Isn't he cute! Where does he get all the energy! Isn't he full of the devil!' and they make all kinds of fuss over him.

Or take a guy gets to be near eighteen. He's big stuff. He smokes right in front of everybody. Maybe he lays a girl. And when his old man brings him into the bar, everybody says, ‘He's a better man than his pa,' and they buy him a beer.

But a kid fifteen, sixteen, is a pain all around and mostly to himself.

He always opens his mouth at the wrong time, and he always says the wrong thing, and he's always doing the wrong thing. And it's not only that everybody else picks on him, but it's like he was always walking around with a mirror in front of him, and a phonograph playing back everything he says. He knows he's acting dumb, but he just can't seem to straighten himself out.

I think part of it is girls. First they're only like washboards running around on sticks and then all of a sudden they're all curves and lipstick, and every time you see a nice one you get all red in the face and think how it would be to grab her.