Recapitulation (8 page)

“But you weren’t born in Salt Lake,” he suggested.

“What makes you think that?”

“Evidence.”

This was her kind of game. With her hip against the table edge she shot a look in search of the hostess, did not see her, cocked her eyebrows, and smiled down on Mason her brilliant smile. “Where does the evidence say I’m from?”

“Somewhere north. Malad? Brigham City? Cache Valley?”

Comic dismay, real puzzlement. “What are you, a medium or something? How’d you know?”

“From the way you say “ ‘carn bread.’ ”

Now an uncertain glance through her lashes. “Oh.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like being from—where is it? Cache Valley?”

“I’m sarry if I talk like a hick.”

“Oh now, come on,” Mason said, contrite. “Who said you talk like a hick? You talk like somebody from up around the Idaho border. You made me feel I’d come home.”

“Yes,” the girl said, rather sullenly, he thought. She was still smiling, but the smile had flattened against her marvelous gleamy toothpaste-ad teeth. As if indifferently, she looked across the Sky Room’s wavering candles. “Jist give me a year,” she said. “If I could git out of here and down to the Coast I’d sure wear the Cache Valley out of me. You wouldn’t know then where I’m from.”

“Maybe you’re better off here,” Mason said. “Don’t knock Cache Valley, or Salt Lake either. You might not like California half as well.”

“Mmm.”

“California food doesn’t taste the way this dinner did. They do something to it. It isn’t served as pleasantly. The sunsets are watery.”

She blinked and smiled and found something to deal with somewhere else in her section. How standard, touching, in the end uninteresting. Dissatisfied provincials, exportable dreams, upward-and-outward mobility. Mason knew all about it.

Venus, in the few minutes his eye had been off it, had slid down behind Antelope Island. He drained his coffee cup, ready to leave. From the second table down, against the windows, a party of four came past, holding him for a minute in his chair. Their table stood disheveled under its soiled dishes and crumpled napkins. A busboy, his face fiery with acne, wheeled up a cart and began to clear away.

Click. Involuntary narrowing of the eyes.

He moves dazed through magic. If you should draw him, you would have to put x’s where his eyes should be, like a funny-paper character who has been hit on the head. He is fourteen, and enchanted. His motions are somnambulistic and his mind numb, but his senses are wide open. The breeze that sweeps through the wall-less pavilion brings in midway sounds: nasal chanting of barkers, thunder of the roller coaster with its obbligato of squeals, shuffling of many feet, cries and mutterings, the rumble and twitter of voices. And midway odors: taffy, pop-corn, cotton candy, rancid grease from hot-dog and hamburger stands, the encompassing smell of the salt flats. The shore breeze blows them into the pavilion and through the tables and across the dance floor and through the unused tables on the other side, picking up in passing all the dining-room odors of roast beef, barbecue sauce, spare ribs, coffee, vinegar, floor wax, a sudden sourceless onion smell of female perspiration, an equally sudden and sourceless whiff of perfume. Tangled and braided, smells and sounds blow through the room and through Bruce and are swept out over the lake.

The lake side, where he is standing, is dark and quiet. Only a mangy velvet rope holds the tables in; beyond are timbers and the sense of water. When the music stops, he can hear the slosh of brine against the pilings down under, and from far off, as if
they came floating on the water, the clear voices of bathers over on the north side, where Chet works. The darkness isolates and protects him. From here in the shadow, when there are no tables to be cleared, he can look and listen.

His eyes are dazzled by the tent of hazy luminance through which he sees. The revived saxophones sob through his soul. The people at the tables are more dressed up and romantic than ordinary people. Some are eating, some have already begun to dance. He watches a pair of girls go by, dancing with one another for lack of male partners. Does one of them look at him with an interest not quite covered by her gum-chewing indifference? He wishes he had a white coat that fitted him. The one he has to wear has sleeves six inches too long, so that he has to turn back the cuffs, and the shoulders are broad enough for someone twice his size.

The members of the band on their platform all wear ice-cream pants and blue jackets and straw skimmers. They are playing “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the people at the tables begin to join in, singing and clapping like people at a picnic.

Near Bruce a boy and girl are doing the Charleston. He is a slicker in a four-button pinch-waisted suit with bell-bottomed pants. The girl’s red dress is so short that he can see her stockings rolled below the knee. Her mouth is red and laughing, her shingled head is like a boy’s. Her feet move in swift twisting motions, following the twistings of her partner’s bell bottoms. They hang on to each other’s arms and put their noses together, watching their feet and laughing.

Bruce can do the Charleston. A high school acquaintance whose mother is a dance instructor taught him one afternoon at Warm Springs. But he is not sure he would do it here. Whole dance halls have been shaken down when a lot of people start doing it. It works like an earthquake. It gets everything going to
a rhythm, and pretty soon the hall vibrates apart. He watches these two, and is both envious and contemptuous of the bell bottoms and the sideburns, and thinks with disapproval that the girl shouldn’t show her knees in public this way, and wonders what it would be like to put his arm around her red silk waist, and with his face only inches from her laughing face, Charleston her around the floor.

He moves to ease the swelling in his pants. What’s the lightest thing in the world, Mr. Gallagher? Your pud, Mr. Sheen, it rises with thought. All by himself, he snickers.

Then he spots a family—father, mother, somewhat fat daughter—leaving a table. With one hand in his pocket, hiding his condition behind the cart, he starts toward them. Ed Mueller, the manager, is watching him, he sees, and he hurries, wanting to impress. Almost at once he feels it is safe to take his hand out of his pocket and be businesslike with both hands on the cart handle. In his mind, as he starts stacking the dishes, is a tableau in which Mueller, at payoff time, publicly praises him.
Watch this Mason kid. He may be little but by God he’s on the job. He could teach all of you something.

His glance brushes the glance of the fattish girl. She turns away so indifferently that he knows she is only lighting a Murad. Back of that nonchalance there is a gleam of curiosity, interest, invitation.

In the grease on one of the plates he finds a nickel embedded, and hastily digs it out and darts after the departing family. “Mister? Sir? You left this.”

Young Lincoln, he waits for their praise. He hopes Mueller is still watching. But the man toward whom he holds the nickel does not accept it. His face is full of heavy astonishment. The fat girl is staring, the mother smooths her dress over her high corseted rump. Slowly comprehension dawns. Bruce’s face grows slowly hot. “Oh,” he says vaguely, and turns away, too confused for thanks or anything else. Three tables away, Ed Mueller, who
has
been watching, is breaking up in laughter.

Sullenly Bruce finishes loading the cart and starts off toward the kitchen around the dark edge of the dance floor. He has an impulse to throw the nickel as far as he can throw it out into the water, but instead he wipes it off on a napkin and pushes it
down into his watch pocket, where his ten-dollar paycheck from the news company where he works during the week is folded tightly around the silver dollar his mother makes him carry in case he should run into what he scornfully calls a Dire Emergency.

His mother doesn’t like his working here. She says it is too much for a boy of fourteen, and not strong at that, to work ten hours a day, six days a week, at the news company, and then ride out fifteen miles on the train and work all Saturday and Sunday night. By the time he gets back to town and catches the Owl streetcar home it is way past midnight. It isn’t like Chet, who sleeps at Saltair, under the Pavilion. And Chet is older. Bruce will ruin his health. He will stunt his growth, which, though she refrains from saying so, seems to be stunted already.

He did not win her over by argument. He simply threw such a tantrum, followed by sulking, that she gave in. This is his second weekend. Though he has been working since eight this morning, and has had for supper only the extra sandwich his mother put in his lunch sack, he is not tired. He is only furious with that stupid man and that fat girl and that Ed Mueller with his horse laugh.

He will show Ed Mueller. Suppose the pavilion caught fire, and while everyone else ran around in panic, trampling each other, suppose here came the one they call Shrimp (unknown to them, he is an Eagle Scout), burrowing along the floor where the air is better, dragging people to safety, grabbing confused Ed Mueller and getting
him
out, plunging back in after others. He comes upon a body with the flames all but swallowing it, and as the fire sweeps up and away and the smoke clears for a moment he recognizes the flapper in the red dress and the shingle bob. Her slicker escort has run like a coward, leaving her to her fate. Fallen, she is wonderfully helpless; her white legs are exposed above the knees. He takes up her soft body (who would have thought he was so strong?) and carries her to safety. Under cover of the smoke he cops a feel.

At the swinging doors to the kitchen he backs around, pulls the cart through, and unloads it onto the table behind which four pearl divers in their undershirts, their tattoos shining with sweat, stand armpit-deep in greasy suds. They are not men to be
fooled with—impatient, savage, dangerous. Though the most dangerous of all, according to Chet, are fry cooks. Fry cooks will take after you with a cleaver if you so much as look at them cross-eyed.

Keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut, he finishes unloading and backs out through the swinging doors. The music comes loud in his face. His sullenness is already forgotten. Out past dancers and diners, above the bright midway, the scrolls and scrawls of the roller coaster lift out of the light into obscurity. A red car is crawling up the first long pitch. He hears the screams and then the thunder as it tips and falls.

What a keen place! As the moon moves through the sky he moves through that dreamland. As swimmers float unsinkable on the brine of Great Salt Lake he floats on blended saxophones. The girl in red and her slicker friend are up again, still doing the Charleston. From time to time one of the band members stands up and sings through a megaphone.

He assures: “It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more.” He exhorts: “Horsie, keep your tail up, keep the sun out of my eyes.” He warns: “You got to see your mama every night or you won’t see your mama at all.”

Eventually it is eleven, the last table has been cleared, they hang around the kitchen waiting to be paid. When Mueller comes in, finally, Bruce accepts his dollar and a half and his train ticket back to town. The long day has come down on him like an avalanche of feathers. Rubber-legged, blind with yawning, he gropes out of the kitchen and staggers across the midway toward the gates beyond which the train waits on the causeway. Behind him the band is playing “Moonlight and Roses,” and the dance floor lights go dim. The nearly empty midway stares, too brightly lighted. Its concessions are closed, all except the check stand, where the attendant is killing time by throwing an ice pick underhanded at the wall.

A crowd has gathered at the gates. They are tired, yawning, subdued. Somebody grumbles that if they’d jist open the gates a man could at least go out to the train and lay down. There is a slow, ponderous leaning as people stack up behind. Everybody is pressed close together, closer to the gates. Packed bodies hold Bruce up on every side. He is down below, and can see little—could
see little even if his eyes were not so heavy. They drag shut against all his efforts to hold them open. Asleep on his feet, embedded in the crowd, he drifts.

A shift, a stagger, somebody steps on his foot, he feels himself losing his balance, and comes awake to find that he has grabbed hold of a girl’s arm. As if his own fantasies were writing the script, it is the girl in red. Muttering an apology, he lets go and straightens himself. She gives him only a glance, yawns loudly, laughs, raises her hands to take hold of her boy friend’s shoulders, and twists him around facing away from her so that she can lay her cheek against his back, pretending to sleep.

Bruce’s fingers tingle with the memory of her skin. Sunk down below everyone, he can’t see out, but he can see, close to him, the girl’s red dress and bare raised arms. Lifted that way, they pull her breast up and out so that it juts alive and bold against the red silk. In Bruce Mason the lightest thing in the world stirs and lifts. No longer sleepy, he folds his arms—it is dusky, he is jammed among people, there is no need of getting a camouflaging hand into his pocket even if there were room to do it. He is as aware of the bulge of her breast as if it were a sparking live wire. With his arms folded, and if he lifts his hands a little high, the fingers of his left hand are within inches of that softness. He is thinking that if the crowd should shift again as it did a minute ago, and if he were again bumped off balance, his fingertips might just brush against her as if by accident.

It does not take long. The crowd does shift. It leans. Instead of bracing against it, he lets it move him. His fingers touch her.

Snap! Her arm clamps down on his hand, pinning it to her side. Her furious face is a foot from his, she has pointed teeth, she is shouting. But he is deaf, his mind has gone white with terror. Frantically he yanks, but she has him. Then she reaches for him with her other hand, and he breaks loose. The boy friend is struggling to turn and get at him. He dives low and burrows, lunging ahead. Hands grab at him, voices rise, but he twists, breaks away, gets beyond the surge of the turmoil he has created. He feels with his body that the gates have just been opened, and he shoves between a man and woman, sees an opening, hits it, and is through onto the causeway and up onto the steps of the open excursion car. Through the car, off the other
side, up along the train in near darkness, he outdistances everyone, slides into the end seat of the front car, facing backward and watching the train fill up.