Place in the City (25 page)

“Yes?”

“You'll come back tomorrow, won't you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“All right.”

“I have to go now. The nurse said—”

“All right.”

He kissed her quickly. Outside, he began to think of Timy; and he realized that for the first time he hated him, deeply, fiercely. He pictured himself with his fingers in Timy's fat pink throat, squeezing.

J
ESSICA
went to Shutzey's apartment, letting herself in with her key. It was a new apartment in another neighborhood, furnished with her own hands and Shutzey's money. It was furnished in the modern way, just like she had seen in the movies. Shutzey had winced a little at the prices she paid, but she explained to him that you couldn't get real class without paying the price. Anyway, he liked whatever she bought; and when she picked things out, he didn't say much, only nodded at everything she selected.

He liked to stretch out in a certain white chair, light his pipe, and puff reflectively, while his eyes absorbed her. He felt respectable and he felt big, and to look at her slim clean-cut beauty was very comforting. The. fact that he could never get any nearer to her than the surface of her skin only served to enhance her in his eyes, and now and again he seriously thought of asking her to marry him. Not that he wanted a wife—but he wanted to be sure of her. She had pushed him into one thing after another, until he was out of his depth, and then for everything, he would turn to her.

She said, now: “I shouldn't have let him go tonight. Suppose he gets it—He'll stand there and fight. He won't have enough sense to know what to do.”

She took off her coat, lit a cigarette, and sat down in Shutzey's big chair. She noticed the stains he had made with his pipe on one of the white leather-covered arms. That was like him. A chair was only something for him to sit in and knock his pipe against.

A while later, she ground out the cigarette and glanced at her watch. It was after nine, and the way Shutzey had figured, he should be with her by half-past ten.

Then she mixed a cocktail, but she couldn't drink it. She left it standing, and smoked more cigarettes. They filled the ash-tray by her side, and one burning end steamed slowly. She watched it, then ground it out. Then she felt cold, and went around the apartment closing windows. The clock said half-past ten. She went to the window, looked down into the street, turned back to the room and paced back and forth like an angry cat.

She thought of Timy and the saloon. What would Shutzey do if Timy made a pass at her, and Shutzey found out? One blow of his fist would crush Timy, the way a butcher's club crushes in a steak. She always saw things like that as if they had already happened. She could see Timy on the floor, writhing, and Shutzey standing over him.

Or what would Timy's body be like to her touch? Soft, probably, and sickening after a while. When Shutzey tensed his muscles with adolescent pride, the sudden swelling threw her from him, hurt her sometimes; and then he would smile with the sort of satisfaction nothing else gave him. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as showing off his muscles, rippling them for her, or raising her from the ground with one hand; and then wilting sheepishly when she raged at him for hurting her.

She lit another cigarette, walked with it to the window, dropped it, and watched its meteor-like flight. Then the phone rang, and she whirled back to the room.

She listened for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “he lives here…. His wife? No…. What? … No, I say I'm not his wife…. I'll come.”

She put down the receiver very slowly, turned and looked into a round rimless mirror that hung over the couch. Then she watched her hands as she lit a cigarette.

“Geesus Christ,” she whispered.

The burning match hung between her fingers, burnt until it singed her skin. Then she dropped it to the carpet; then she put her fingers in her mouth, licked them, bit them, took them out and stared dully at the marks.

She stared at Shutzey's chair.

Then she stumbled about, trying to find her coat.

I
T WAS
over for him at half-past ten. Claus stood up, walked to the door.

“Now take it easy,” the guard said.

He stepped out, felt that he was stepping over the edge of a tall building, gingerly put his foot into the corridor, glanced down where the door was. Behind that door, they were waiting. And with him in the corridor was the priest; he had come back.

“Take it easy,” the guard said again.

In every cell they were watching, their eyes glued to the bars; but nobody said anything. It was like a silent movie audience engrossed in a drama. The warden was there. He chewed his lips and fingered a cigarette.

He might have been terribly funny, if he were not tragic, the tall thin man, his fleshless head shaved clean, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He stopped to adjust his glasses. He swallowed, and the lump in his throat bobbed up and down. He laid a finger against his long pointed nose, sneezed, and then let his hand fall limply to his side.

“Come on,” the guard said.

He was still curious enough to look at the man in the next cell, the one who had been granted a stay of execution, a little man with crossed eyes.

“Hell—I'm sorry, Dutch,” he whispered.

He began to walk, but it seemed to him that the cells were moving slowly past him, that he was standing still. Suddenly, his legs were limp; he had to stop and support himself on the guard for a moment. Then the cells began to move again.

There was an almost imperceptible pause as he passed a cell and saw the man in it. Some of them nodded. One said, “So long,” the others said nothing.

His mind worked in quick flashes, or else it was deliberately slow; and all in a flash, he thought, “They would speak to me—only they're afraid. What do I look like?”

Then a blank. Perhaps it was only for seconds, but then his mind was blank; and when it awoke again he was at the door that led out—

“I'm not afraid, my Anna,” he said stubbornly. But his head dropped, and as he walked through the door he seemed to have lost many inches in height, for he was all stooped over and bent, an old, old man.

And after he passed, there was a great hush, a great, terrible hush that endured until the sudden dimming of the lights told of the rush of current.

I
F THE
passing of Shutzey was great, it was great only in the way that all deaths are great, and all lives and all births: but it was not remembered and it did not become legend, as the poet did.

Jessica looked at the body, lying in the police morgue, the face blue and cold, with just the trace of the mocking smile that had always marked him. If she thought of anything as the policeman spoke, she thought of the stark drama of his passing, as it had appeared to Shutzey.

—As his car swings over, blocking the truck that held a fortune in bootleg liquor. The truck is stained with the caked mud and dirt of a thousand miles travel. Lit up by a street lamp, it looms high in the narrow empty street. Shutzey leaps out, a gun in his hand, Snookie Eagen behind him.

“Get out!”

They run up to the truck, poke their guns into the black cab. They hear someone say, “Let 'em have it”; but they never realize the full import of the words. A Thompson gun stabs out of the cab with bright little flashes. Snookie Eagen is crying like a woman; the sheer force of the blast hurls the massive body of Shutzey back into the street.

Maybe he realizes that he is shot all through the middle, or maybe he doesn't realize anything. Snookie is dead in a little humped-up pile, but Shutzey struggles to his feet and begins to run. He doesn't think about Mary White, or indeed that anyone has betrayed him. Reason is gone already; but the surging life of a man-beast is left; the man himself is dead.

He runs with slow, faltering steps, slower than a man walks, and the Thompson gun stabs after him.

The shock of the bullets throw him over again, four across his back, two through the heart. Yet he staggers up, on his knees, on his feet, turns around, and receives the last burst of bullets squarely in the chest. The mocking grin remained.

He is leaning forward at the end, and perhaps the bullets hold him erect. Then he sags; his knees go; one slug is lodged in his spine, yet the upper part of his body is stiff.

As he lies on the ground, a final burst sears his back, rips open his thighs….

The truck backs; it jolts half up on the curb, rolls back into the, street with a grinding of gears, and roars away into the night….

They told it to her. An officer said:

“Ain't it funny as hell—the kind of dolls that go with them mugs.”

And another: “Them pimps are all the same. He didn't have no business trying to hijack that truck.”

She went back up to the booking room, and the man on duty looked at her sleepily. “Sit down,” he said.

She sat down and lit a cigarette. She shook her head, pushed a stray wisp of hair out of her eye.

“I don't have to stay here,” she said.

“You wait. The captain wants to talk with you.”

“All right.” It didn't matter. She puffed the cigarette; she couldn't stop thinking about how his body was all torn to pieces, all the different parts of his body, parts that she had learnt so well.

“Well—he's dead, ain't he?” she said to herself.

She stared at the lights in the globes, one at each corner of the high desk. She stared at them until her eyes hurt with the light, until everything else was dull and hazy. And then she felt tears in her eyes, and, wondered whether she was crying because of Shutzey.

Someone came in. She heard the officer say: “Hello, Timy. Glad to see you.”

“I heard about Shutzey,” Timy said.

“Yeah. He got it. Wanna look at him?”

“Yeah—”

Then he saw her; she saw him dully at first, and then he cleared in her eyes, a round, fat, confident man, eying her deliberately. He whispered something to the officer.

“Yeah.”

His small blue eyes widened.

“You goin' to look at him?”

“No.”

He took his hat off and went over to Jessica. He stood in front of her.

“Shutzey was my friend,” he said softly.

She looked at him; but she said nothing. They stared at each other, appraised each other, measured each other, and perhaps they were both thinking the same thing. And the policeman watched them with careless interest.

“It ain't very nice for you to sit here,” Timy said, just as though he knew all about it.

She glanced at the policeman.

“It's all right,” Timy said.

She rose, and he took her arm. The officer looked at him, and Timy nodded.

“It's all right,” Timy said again.

Then they walked out together. She didn't wonder where Timy would take her; it was enough that she was with Timy. That was the way it had to be, step by step, up and up. Yet—

“I wonder whether she's laughing or crying?” Timy thought.

And, as in answer to his thought, she said: “I don't know.” It was the first time she had doubted herself in a long while.

L
ATE
at night, that night, O'Lacy stopped under the plane tree. He stopped for a breath of fresh air, because to him it always seemed that fresh air lingered under that tree.

He reached up, took a bud between his finger, squeezed it, and sniffed the juice on his hands. Then he walked on.

He walked on down the street; his walk was an even, steady one, the walk of a man whose conscience is clear. And if anyone had seen him, that person might have reflected that among all apparent disorder, O'Lacy was order; that O'Lacy in himself was nothing, that his spirit was a balance for the future, as if he regulated the melting pot. And that person would consider that of all people, O'Lacy gave promise for the future. And the promise—

A
S THAT
night, other nights, so many other nights. Seven years are more than six months, and one expects that things will be different. But not too different.

The story is of Peter. Snow was falling. In the morning it was clear, but in the afternoon it began, with clouds piling out of the north and the east. It snowed easily, lightly, the snow coming down in big white flakes. It was snowing at four o'clock in the afternoon, when all light was fading, when the street lamps made splotches in the curtain of snow.

When he walked by the corner, he saw Meyer pushing away the snow with a large square shovel. The old man's white head was bare. Bits of snow settled there, melted, little drops of water rolled down his cheeks.

“Give me it,” Peter said.

Meyer glanced up at him and shook his head.

“I don't want any money,” Peter told him. Then he took the shovel and went at the snow, and Meyer pattered about after him, chattering hurriedly. It was the third time that winter that Peter had shoveled his snow for him, and by now Meyer took it for granted. If the boy was a fool—

“In Washington it's like summer,” Meyer said. “My Jessica writes me it's like summer—like summer.”

Peter nodded. His long form threw away the snow, more in one stroke than Meyer gathered in four.

“She don't send me money—but if I have a good daughter, do I want that?”

“I should think not.”

“Yeah—you see. A little snow back here; Peter. Ah—what's the use? The snow keeps on, and in an hour it's just as bad.”

“I think it'll stop,” Peter said, glancing up.

“Don't I know? I'm older than you. It won't stop.”

Peter grinned. He gave the shovel to Meyer, and walked down the street.

And Meyer went into the store. Bessie was behind the counter, and Meyer said to her:

“Early, we'll close. Who'll come for cigars in such weather?” He put the shovel away. “I'm tired.”

Bessie was sealing a letter. He noticed it, came nearer to peer at it. Then he put on his glasses.