In God We Trust (30 page)

From behind geraniums all over the neighborhood other eyes watched. Strange people began arriving in dented blue cars, panel trucks; some just wallking, carrying baskets and bags. They were the first Auction Followers we had ever seen. There is a race of Human Vulture that lives off the disaster and defeat of others, picking the bones clean. They perform a necessary function, just as any scavenger does. Those on the scene early were rummaging through the piles of coffee pots, old tires, potted ferns, and Mr. Kissel’s toolbox which he carried to the roundhouse on the few days he worked every month.

“There’s Mr. Kissel’s bottle-capper,” I said, breaking the silence in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” my father answered, continuing to stare into the bright sunshine.

Mr. Kissel made Home Brew and when we played in Junior Kissel’s basement we always fooled around with his bottle-capper, capping bottles of water, pretending we were bootleggers. Now the bottle-capper lay in the yard next to Mrs. Kissel’s old Hoover vacuum cleaner.

Old furniture under the light of a bright sky seems more tired and worn than anything else I know. In an eerie way more human, too. The crowd was getting bigger by the minute. Some carried lunches; others babies. They were excited and anxious for the action to begin. None of the neighbors showed up. At least they weren’t in the crowd that pushed and waited around the platform. They were strangers. It doesn’t pay for vultures to make friends.

My kid brother wanted to go out and join in the fun, but the Old Man said:

“We’ll go out and play Catch after the people go. You stay here until they leave.”

He was a dedicated Catch player. Any time he announced that we were going to play Catch kids listened, and hunted for their mitts. His slider was the best I’ve ever seen outside of Comiskey Park.

The sheriff got up on the platform to begin the proceedings, his voice echoing hollowly among the sagging garage doors, the drooping clothespoles, and the limp wetwash. The auctioneer began with a brass table lamp, the one we used to see through their dining-room window, with the green shade. It was quickly bought. The crowd moved in excitement as the auctioneer went into high gear. Mrs. Kissel’s enamel kitchen table went for seventy cents.

Once my father turned to my mother and said:

“I guess they’re not home. I don’t see them anywhere.”

She didn’t answer, but I knew that Junior Kissel wasn’t around.

Someone bought Grandpa Kissel’s World War I helmet which Mr. Kissel had hung on the inside of the basement door. It was a great thing to play with. I guess someone bought it for their kid. No one wanted the mattress, a lumpy, yellow-stained, blue-striped heirloom that had come down from Mrs. Kissel’s parents and had seen the raising of ten kids. It lay under the truck bed, shoved out of the way while the more valuable items were bartered off.

Rusty saws, an old single-barreled 12-gauge shotgun that brought four dollars, a spectacular oil tablecloth with red ornamental lettering:
A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR
, with a gold picture of the Hall of Science. The bidding for this one was sharp and bitter.

Finally it was over. It didn’t last long, maybe forty-five minutes or so, but when it was over the end was definite. The sheriff got up and announced that the auction was now officially completed. He mentioned an address where another
was scheduled in a day or two, on the west side of town. The people got back into their cars, trucks, station wagons and left as quickly as they had come, loaded down with their loot.

Without confusion or hesitation the men and the sheriff packed away their gear like a well-practiced team, and were gone. All that remained in the backyard was a jumble of lunch bags, pop bottles, chicken bones, crushed cartons, empty barrels, and the mattress.

By now it was almost lunchtime and I was already getting hungry. My mother, watching the final truck disappear, said:

“Oh well.”

The Old Man went down into the basement to get his glove for the game of Catch.

Later that afternoon someone said that the Kissels had gone to Lowell, a town a few miles away, to spend the weekend with Mrs. Kisser’s brother-in-law and sister. They never came back. Somewhere along about the middle of the next week a
FOR RENT
sign appeared on the Kissels’ front door. Not long afterward a new family moved in. We never saw Junior Kissel again.

XXIX
THE POSSE RIDES AGAIN

I glanced at my stainless-steel Rolex, noting that it was getting along toward 4:00, Shift-Change time. I could see that Flick was showing the tenseness of a man about to swing into action.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Flick said, “I keep up with the bills. I don’t owe nobody. Just a minute; I’ll be right back.”

He moved on down the bar, checking his ammunition for the first wave of serious drinkers, which would arrive within the half hour. I looked again at my Rolex. For some reason I didn’t quite recognize it at first as belonging to
my
arm, and to be honest I wasn’t sure that it
was
even my arm. Somehow that sleeve and that watch all belonged in New York. Another world. Back there they probably would not even believe there
was
such a man as Flick. Or Stosh, or Kissel, or Yahkey. They’d probably figure I made ’em all up.

I fleetingly thought, Maybe I should try to tell Flick about
Les Misérables des Frites
, and Henri, the lascivious headwaiter. How could I tell him about the expense account, and how hardly anybody I knew ever paid for anything, ever, and that the vast Gravy Train they were on considered cash itself to be vaguely insulting and out of date. I figured it was no use.

In the booth, the three Sheet-Metal men began hollering at Flick, who looked up from his inventory and yelled back:

“HOLD YER WATER, FER CHRISSAKE! I GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN FEED YOU BASTARDS ALL DAY
!”

The red-faced one wearing an orange safety helmet shouted:

“TURN ONNA TV, FLICK! WHAT THE HELL YOU GOT IT FOR?”

This exchange took place at full voice, since the jukebox was shaking the floor.

“I’LL TURN IT ON WHEN I’M DAMN GOOD AND READY
!”

I wondered briefly how Flick would get along with Henri, the effete and painfully elegant headwaiter who controlled the entire East Side of New York.

Flick finally reached up and snapped on the switch of the monster color TV set that hung high over the bar mirror. It seemed to warm up instantly. A thundering herd of posse riders roared across the screen. Mister Clean appeared briefly, and disappeared. Again the posse thundered, this time in the opposite direction, their guns roaring above the booming polka. Obviously conversation was out of the question, or at least it had become somewhat hazardous.

There is something about TV sets in bars that makes even sane people look at them. I sipped what seemed to be at least my thirtieth beer of the afternoon, staring upward at a moonfaced cowboy strumming a guitar. Behind him I could see old familiar country that I knew like the back of my hand. Those Hollywood back lots were as familiar as my own backyard, when I was a kid.

Flick finished his bottle-checking, armed himself with a clean bar rag, and stood briefly looking up at another posse, this time roaring directly at us, the puffs of their guns, their square jaws, the flying hoofs blending well with the eternal jukebox. We both watched for a long moment.

“I seen it.”

“So have I. If I remember correctly, Flick, that fat guy on the left is going to get shot. He.…”

Just as I said it, the fat guy spun into the air, dying spectacularly as cowboy extras always do, clutching at the clouds, slipping into the sagebrush, milking his scene as far as he could under union rules.

“Yep. I seen it.”

Flick turned back from the set with the air of a man adding a period at the end of a sentence.

I, however, continued to stare at the set. It seemed one of those eerie coincidences that happen once in a while, and that cause ladies who wear tennis shoes to believe in ESP, flying saucers, and swamis. I was not sure whether I should bring it up, else Flick suspect that I had had at least one beer too many. I could see he was the kind of bartender who did not serve drunks, but probably tossed them by the scruff of their neck out into the gale.

“Flick, I have seen that picture, too.”

“Yep. I seen it,” Flick said.

“You know, I have a feeling that I saw it with
you.”

He looked back up at the set again for a long moment, as though to check his memory. The posse thundered down a ravine, diagonally this time, from left to right. Finally he said reflectively:

“By God, I think you’re right. It played with
Rhythm on the Prairie
, with Dick Foran. And they had Bob Steele, in person.”

We both disappeared briefly into our own dream world, eventually broken by Flick, who said:

“That was the day Schwartz threw up in the drinking fountain in the lobby.”

“Correct! That’s right.”

We returned to the posse for a bit, and finally I had to ask a question that was on my mind ever since the first gunshot.

“Flick, did Doppler ever show his face around here again?” He turned back to me, his expression as grim as any of those hard-faced men riding in that eternal posse, pursuing endless Badguys through the wilds of MGM Land.

“Doppler?”

His voice snapped like Ken Maynard biting out the name of a sheep rustler.

“He wouldn’t
dare
show up around here. They’d string him up in a minute.”

XXX
LEOPOLD DOPPLER AND THE GREAT ORPHEUM GRAVY BOAT RIOT

Five thousand years from now, when future archaeologists are picking and scraping among the shards and the midden heaps, attempting to put together the mosaic of the rich, full life led by twentieth-century man, they will come across many a mystery that is impenetrable even to those who lived through it. A cracked fragment of a Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine Shake-Up Mug, a Shirley Temple Cream Pitcher, a heavily corroded Tom Mix Lucky Horse-Shoe Nail Ring, an incomplete set of Gilbert Roland/Pola Negri/Thomas Meighan Movie Star Sterling Silver Teaspoons with Embossed Autographs will undoubtedly be key items in files marked:

But we will know, won’t we?

    Not long ago, in a shabby motel in New England, I sat down on a cold, rainy dawn to a bowl of soggy Wheaties and found myself suddenly, and for no reason, thinking of Rochelle Hudson. Rochelle Hudson! She had not entered my conscious musings
since the age of eight. The sound of traffic roaring by on the Maine Turnpike reminded me that Reality was only a hundred yards away. As I spooned up more of the cereal that Jack Armstrong ate and that Hudson High won its football games for, I hurled Rochelle Hudson from my mind. Instantly she was replaced by Warner Oland, the original and definitive Charlie Chan. He grinned at me from under his Homburg, enigmatically, and disappeared. There stood Judge Hardy, about to have a man-to-man talk with either me or Mickey Rooney. The thump of a football, and roly-poly Jack Oakie, wearing a white sweater with a big block C, picked up his megaphone and started a Locomotive as Tom Brown, his arm in a sling, June Preiser clinging to his jersey, trotted out on the gridiron—Center College six points behind and only four seconds left in the game! The crowd roared, blending with the sound of a huge Diesel bellowing by on its way to Augusta.

I was yanked back to the Now momentarily as a plate of toast was clanked down next to my coffee. But I could not fight it. Without reason or rhyme the film unwound in my subconscious, picking up the tempo of the thundering traffic on the great turnpike, as Jimmy Cagney, his Maserati in flames, roared past the immense grandstands at Indianapolis, the mob screaming for blood, his oil line broken, his faithful mechanic—Frank McHugh—dying of burns in the cockpit next to him. The checkered flag fell as Jimmy, his goggles misted from streaming gasoline, a thin, ironical smile on his lips, swerved into the pits. Out stepped Alan Hale, rugged, silver-haired, beaming, in the full-dress uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted. With him, riding easy in the saddle, was Dick Foran. And a string of broad-chested Malemute dogs howled as they headed into the great forest after another Fugitive from Justice.