Humboldt's Gift (13 page)

  “Go on, go on,” said Cantabile.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “To the can. Where is it?”

  “Don’t you want the dough?”

  “I said the can! The can!”

  I then understood, his bowels were acting up, he had been caught short, he had to go to the toilet, and I was to go with him. He wouldn’t allow me to wait in the street. “Okay,” I said, “just take it easy and I’ll lead you.” He followed me through the locker room. The John entrance was doorless. Only the individual stalls have doors. I motioned him forward and was about to sit down on one of the locker-room benches nearby but he gave me a hard push on the shoulder and drove me forward. These toilets are the Bath at its worst. The radiators put up a stunning dry heat. The tiles are never washed, never disinfected. A hot dry urine smell rushes to your eyes like onion fumes. “Jesus!” said Cantabile. He kicked open a stall, still keeping me in front of him. He said, “You go in first.”

  “The both of us?” I said.

  “Hurry up.”

  “There’s space only for one.”

  He tugged out his gun and shook the butt at me. “You want this in your teeth?” The black fur of his mustache spread as the lip of his distorted face stretched. His brows were joined above the nose like the hilt of a large dagger. “In the corner, you!” He slammed the door and panting, took off his things. He thrust the raglan and the matching hat into my arms, although there was a hook. There was even a piece of hardware I had never before noticed. Attached to the door was a brass fitting, a groove labeled
Cigar
, a touch of class from the old days. He was seated now with the gun held in both palms, his hands between his knees, his eyes first closing then dilating greatly.

  In a situation like this I can always switch out and think about the human condition over-all. Of course he wanted to humiliate me. Because I was a
chevalier
of the
Légion d’honneur
? Not that he actually knew of this. But he was aware that I was as they would say in Chicago a
Brain
, a man of culture or intellectual attainments. Was this why I had to listen to him rumbling and slopping and smell his stink? Perhaps fantasies of savagery and monstrosity, of beating my brains out, had loosened his bowels. Humankind is full of nervous invention of this type, and I started to think (to distract myself) of all the volumes of ape behavior I had read in my time, of Kohler and Yerkes and Zuckerman, of Marais on baboons and Schaller on gorillas, and of the rich repertory of visceral-emotional sensitivities in the anthropoid branch. It was even possible that I was a more limited person than a fellow like Cantabile in spite of my concentration on intellectual achievement. For it would never have occurred to me to inflict anger on anyone by such means. This might have been a sign that his vital endowment or natural imagination was more prodigal and fertile than mine. In this way, thinking improving thoughts, I waited with good poise while he crouched there with his hardened dagger brows. He was a handsome slender man whose hair had a natural curl. It was cropped so close that you could see the roots of his curls and I observed the strong contraction of his scalp in this moment of stress. He wanted to inflict a punishment on me but the result was only to make us more intimate.

  As he stood and then wiped, and then pulled his shirttails straight, belting his pants with the large oval buckle and sticking back the gun (I hoped the safety catch was on), as I say, when he pulled his shirttails straight and buckled his stylish belt on the hip-huggers, thrusting the gun in, flushing the toilet with his pointed soft boot, too fastidious to touch the lever with his hand—he said, “Christ, if I catch the crabs here . , . !” As if that would be my fault. He was evidently a violent reckless blâmer. He said, “You don’t know how I hated to sit here. These old guys must piss on the seats.” This too he entered on the debit side against me. Then he said, “Who owns this joint?”

  Now this was a fascinating question. It had never occurred to me, you know. The Bath was so ancient, it was like the Pyramids of Egypt, the Gardens of Ashurbanipal. It was like water seeking its level, or like gravitational force. But who in fact was its proprietor? “I’ve never heard of an owner,” I said. “For all I know it’s some old party out in British Columbia.”

  “Don’t get smart. You’re too fucking smart. I only asked for information. I’ll find out.”

  To turn the faucet he used a piece of toilet paper. He washed his hands without soap, none was provided by the management. At this moment I offered him the nine fifty-dollar bills again. He refused to look at them. He said, “My hands are wet.” He wouldn’t use the roller towel. It was, I must admit, repulsively caked, filthy, with a certain originality in the way of filth. I held out my pocket handkerchief, but he ignored it. He didn’t want his anger to diminish. Spreading his fingers wide he shook them dry. Full of the nastiness of the place he said, “Is this what they call a Bath?”

  “Well,” I said, “the bathing is all downstairs.”

  They had two long rows of showers, below, which led to the heavy wooden doors of the steam room. There also was a small cistern, the cold plunge. The water was unchanged from year to year, and it was a crocodile’s habitat if I ever saw one.

  Cantabile now hurried out to the lunch counter, and I followed him. There he dried his hands with paper napkins which he pulled from the metal dispenser angrily. He crumpled these embossed flimsy papers and threw them on the floor. He said to Mickey, “Why don’t you have soap and towels in the can? Why don’t you wash the goddamn place out? There’s no disinfectant in there.”

  Mickey was very mild, and he said, “No? Joe is supposed to take care of it. I buy him Top Job, Lysol.” He spoke to Joe. “Don’t you put in mothballs any more?” Joe was black and old, and hé answered nothing. He was leaning on the shoe-shine chair with its brass pedestals, the upside-down legs and rigid feet (reminiscent of my own feet and legs during the Yoga headstand). He was there to remind us all of some remote, grand considerations and he would not answer any temporal questions.

  “You guys are gonna buy supplies from me,” said Cantabile. “Disinfectant, liquid soap, paper towels, everything. The name is Cantabile. I’ve got a supply business on Clybourne Avenue.” He took out a long pitted ostrich-skin wallet and threw several business cards on the counter.

  “I’m not the boss,” said Mickey. “All I have is the restaurant concession.” But he picked up a card with deference. His big fingers were covered with black knife-marks.

  “I better hear from you.”

  “I’ll pass it along to the Management. They’re downtown.”

  “Mickey, who owns the Bath?” I said.

  “All I know is the Management, downtown.”

  It would be curious, I thought, if the Bath should turn out to belong to the Syndicate.

  “Is George Swiebel here?” said Cantabile.

  “No.”

  “Well, I want to leave him a message.”

  “I’ll give you something to write on,” said Mickey.

  “There’s nothing to write. Tell him he’s a dumb shit. Tell him I said so.”

  Mickey had put on his specs to look for a piece of paper, and now he turned his spectacled face toward us as if to say that his only business was the coleslaw and skirt-steaks and whitefish. Cantabile did not ask for old Father Myron, who was steaming himself below.

  We went out into the street. The weather had suddenly cleared. I couldn’t decide whether gloomy weather suited the environment better than bright. The air was cold, the light was neat, and the shadows thrown by blackened buildings divided the sidewalks.

  I said, “Well, now let me give you this money. I brought new bills. This ought to wrap the whole thing up, Mr. Cantabile.”

  “What—just like that? You think it’s so easy?” said Rinaldo.

  “Well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have happened. I really regret it.”

  “You regret it! You regret your hacked-up car. You stopped a check on me, Citrine. Everybody blabbed. Everybody knows. You think I can allow it?”

  “Mr. Cantabile, who knows—who is everybody? Was it really so serious? I was wrong—”

  “Wrong, you fucking ape. . . !”

  “Okay, I was stupid.”

  “Your pal George tells you to stop a check, so you stop it. Do you take that asshole’s word for everything? Why didn’t he catch Emil and me in the act? He has you pull this sneaky stunt and then you and he and the undertaker and the tuxedo guy and the other dummies spread around the gossip that Ronald Cantabile is a punk. Man! You could never get away with that. Don’t you realize!”

  “Yes, now I realize.”

  “No, I don’t know what you realize. I was watching at the game, and I don’t dig you. When are you going to do something
and know what you’re doing
?” Those last words he spaced, he accented vehemently and uttered into my face. Then he snatched away his coat, which I was still holding for him, the rich brown raglan with its large buttons. Circe might have had buttons like those in her sewing box. They were very beautiful, really, rather Oriental-treasure buttons.

  The last garment I had seen resembling this one was worn by the late Colonel McCormick. I was then about twelve years old. His limousine had stopped in front of the Tribune Tower, and two short men came out. Each man held two pistols, and they circled on the pavement, crouching low. Then, in this four-gun setting, the Colonel stepped out from his car in just such a tobacco-colored coat as Cantabile’s and a pinch hat with gleaming harsh fuzz. The wind was stiff, the air pellucid, the hat glistened like a bed of nettles.

  “You don’t think I know what I’m doing, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “No you don’t. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

  Well, he may have been right. But at least I wasn’t crucifying anyone. Apparently life had not happened to me as it had happened to other people. For some indiscernible reason it happened differently to them, and so I was not a fit judge of their concerns and desires. Aware of this I acceded to more of these desires than was practical. I gave in to George’s low-life expertise. Now I bent before Cantabile. My only resource was to try to remember useful things from my ethological reading about rats, geese, sticklebacks, and dancing flies. What good is all this reading if you can’t use it in the crunch? All I asked was a small mental profit.

  “Anyway, what about these fifty-dollar bills?” I said.

  “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to take them,” he said. “You didn’t like what happened to your car, did you?”

  I said, “It’s a beautiful machine. It was really heartless to do that.”

  Apparently the bats he had threatened me with were what he had used on the Mercedes and there were probably more assault weapons in the back seat of the Thunderbird. He made me get into this showy auto. It had leather bucket seats red as spilt blood and an immense instrument panel. He took off at top speed from a standstill, like an adolescent drag-racer, the tires wildly squealing.

  In the car I got a slightly different impression of him. Seen in profile, his nose ended in a sort of white bulb. It was intensely, abnormally white. It reminded me of gypsum and it was darkly lined. His eyes were bigger than they ought to have been, artificially dilated perhaps. His mouth was wide, with an emotional underlip in which there was the hint of an early struggle to be thought full grown. His large feet and dark eyes also hinted that he aspired to some ideal, and that his partial attainment or nonattainment of the ideal was a violent grief to him. I suspected that the ideal itself might be fitful.

  “Was it you or your cousin Emil that fought in Vietnam?”

  We were speeding eastward on Division Street. He held the wheel in both hands as though it were a pneumatic drill to chop up the macadam. “What! Emil in the Army? Not that kid. He was 4-F, practically psycho. No, the most action Emil ever saw was during the 1968 riots in front of the Hilton. He was twigged out and didn’t even know which side he was on. No, I was in Vietnam. The folks sent me to that smelly Catholic college near St. Louis that I mentioned at the game, but I dropped out and enlisted. That was some time back.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “I’ll tell you what you want to hear. I stole a tank of gasoline —the truck, trailer, and all. I sold it to some blackmarket guys. I got caught but my folks made a deal. Senator Dirksen helped. I was only eight months in jail.”

  He had a record of his own. He wished me to know that he was a true Cantabile, a throwback to the Twenties and no mere Uncle Moochy. A military prison—he had a criminal pedigree and he could produce fear on his own credentials. Also the Can-tabiles were evidently in small rackets of the lesser hoodlum sort, as witness the toilet-disinfectant business on Clybourne Avenue. Perhaps also a currency exchange or two—currency exchanges were often owned by former small-time racketeers. Or in the extermination business, another common favorite. But he was obviously in the minor leagues. Perhaps he was in no league at all. As a Chicagoan I had some sense of this. A real big shot used hired muscle. No Vito Langobardi would carry baseball bats in the back seat of his car. A Langobardi went to Switzerland for winter sports. Even his dog traveled in class. Not in decades had a Langobardi personally taken part in violence. No, this restless striving smoky-souled Cantabile was on the outside trying to get in. He was the sort of unacceptable entrepreneur that the sanitation department still fished out of the sewers after three months of decomposition. Certain persons of this type were occasionally found in the trunks of automobiles parked at O’Hare. The weight of the corpse at the back was balanced by a cinderblock laid on the motor.

  Deliberately, at the next corner, Rinaldo ran a red light. He rode the bumper of the car ahead and he made other motorists chicken out. He was elegant, flashy. The seats of the T-bird were specially upholstered in soft leather—so soft, so crimson! He wore the sort of gloves sold to horsemen at Abercrombie & Fitch. At the expressway he swept right and gunned up the slope, running into merging traffic. Cars braked behind us. His radio played rock music. And I recognized Cantabile’s scent. It was Canoe. I had once gotten a bottle of it for Christmas from a blind woman named Muriel.