Rich Man, Poor Man (14 page)

The Germans had surrendered that morning.

Thomas and Claude had wandered around town with the crowds, watching girls kissing soldiers and sailors in the streets and people bringing out bottles of whiskey. Throughout the day Thomas grew more and more disgusted. Men who had dodged the draft for four years, clerks in uniforms who had never been more than a hundred miles away from home, merchants who had made fortunes off the black market, all kissing and yelling and getting drunk as though they, personally, had killed Hitler.

‘Slobs,’ he had said to Claude, as he watched the celebrants. ‘I’d like to show ‘em.’

‘Yeah,’ Claude said. ‘We ought to have a little celebration of our own. Our own private fireworks.’ He had been thoughtful after that, not saying anything, as he watched his elders cavorting. He took off his glasses and chewed on an earpiece, as was his habit when he was preparing a coup. Thomas recognised the signs, but braced himself against anything rash. This was no time for picking on soldiers and any kind of fight, even with a civilian, would be a wrong move today.

Finally, Claude had come up with his VE Day plan and Thomas conceded that it was worthy of the occasion.

So there they were on the Boylan Hill, with Thomas carrying the can of gasoline and Claude the bag of nails and the hammer and the bundle of rags, making their way cautiously through the underbrush towards a dilapidated greenhouse standing on a bare knoll about five hundred yards from the main house. They had not come the usual way, but had approached the estate on a small dirt road that was on the inland site, away from Port Philip, and led to the rear of the house. They had broken in through a gardener’s gate and left the bike hidden near an abandoned gravel pit outside the estate walls.

They reached the greenhouse on the knoll. Its glass panes were dusty and broken and a musty odour of rotten vegetation came from it. There were some long, dry planks along one side of the sagging structure, and a rusty shovel that they had noticed on other occasions when they had prowled the grounds. When Thomas began to dig, Claude selected two big planks and began to hammer them into a cross. They had perfected their plans during the day and there was no need for words.

When the cross was finished, Claude soaked the boards with gasoline. Then they both lifted it and jammed it into the hole that Thomas had dug. He put dirt around the base of the cross, and stamped it down with his feet, and the back of the shovel, to keep everything firm. Claude soaked the rags he had been carrying with the rest of the gasoline. Everything was ready. The boom of the cannon floated up the hill from the highschool lawn and rockets glared briefly far off in the night sky.

Thomas was calm and deliberate in his movements. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t anything very important that they were doing. Once more, in his own way, he was thumbing his nose at all those grownup phoneys down there. With the extra

pleasure of doing it on that naked prick Boylan’s property. Give them all something to think about, between kisses and the ‘Star-Spangled Banner*. But Claude was all worked up. He was gasping, as though he couldn’t get any air in his lungs, and he was bubbling, almost drooling at the mouth, and he had to keep wiping his glasses off with his handkerchief because they kept clouding up. It was an act of huge significance for Claude, with an uncle who was a priest, and a father who made him go to Mass every Sunday and who lectured him daily on Mortal Sin, keeping away from loose Protestant women, and remaining pure in the eyes of Jesus.

‘Okay,’ Thomas said softly, stepping back.

Claude’s hands trembled as he struck a match and bent over and touched it to the gasoline-soaked rags at the base of the cross. Then he screamed and began to run, as the rags flared up. His arm was on fire and he ran blindly across the clearing, screaming. Thomas ran after him, yelling to him to stop, but Claude just kept running, crazily. Thomas caught up with him and tackled him, then rolled on Claude’s arm, using his chest, which was protected by his sweater, to smother the flames.

It was over in a moment. Claude lay on his back, moaning, holding his burnt arm, and whimpering, unable to say anything.

Thomas stood up and looked down at his friend. Every drop of sweat on Claude’s face could be clearly made out, in the light of the flaming cross. They had to get out of there fast. People were bound to arrive any minute. ‘Get up,’ Thomas said. But Claude didn’t move. He rolled a little from side to side, with his eyes staring, but that was all.

‘Get up, you stupid son of a bitch,’ Thomas shook Claude’s shoulder. Claude looked up at him, his face rigid with fear, dumb. Thomas bent over and picked Claude up and threw him over his shoulder and began to run down off the crown of the hill in the direction of the gardener’s gate, crashing through underbrush, trying not to listen to Claude saying, ‘Oh, Jesus, oh Jesus, oh, sweet Mother Mary.’

There was a smell Thomas recognised, as he stumbled down the hill under the weight of his friend. It was the smell of boiling meat.

The cannon was still booming down in the town.

Axel Jordache rowed slowly out towards the centre of the river, feeling the pull of the current. He wasn’t rowing for excercise tonight. He was out on the river to get away from the human race. He had decided to take the night off, the first weekday night he had not worked since 1924. Let his customers eat factory bread tomorrow. After all, the German army only lost once every twenty-seven years.

It was cool on the river, but he was warm enough, in his heavy blue turtle-neck sweater from his deckhand days on the Lakes. And he had a bottle with him to take the nip out of the air and to drink to the health of the idiots who had once more led Germany to ruin. Jordache was a patriot of no country, but he reserved his hatred for the land in which he was born. It had given him a lifelong limp, had cut short his education, and exiled him, and had armed him with an utter contempt for all policies and all politicians, all generals, priests, ministers, presidents, kings, dictators, all conquests and all defeats, all candidates and all parties. He was pleased that Germany had lost the war, but he was not happy that America had won it. He hoped he’d be around twenty-seven years from now, when Germany would lose another war.

He thought of his father, a little, God-fearing, tyrannical man, a clerk in a factory office, who had gone marching off, singing, with a posy of flowers in his rifle barrel, a happy, militant sheep, to be killed at Tannenburg, proud to leave two sons who soon would be fighting for the Vaterland, too, and a wife who had remained a widow less than a year. Then at least she had had the wisdom to marry a lawyer who spent the war managing tenements behind the Alexander Platz in Berlin.

‘Deutchland, Deutschland, uber alles,’ Jordache sang mockingly, resting on his oars, letting the waters of the Hudson carry him south as he lifted the bottle of bourbon to his lips. He toasted the youthful loathing with which he had regarded Germany when he had been demobilised, a cripple among cripples, and which had driven him across the ocean. America was a joke, too, but at least he was alive tonight as were his sons, and the house in which he lived was still standing.

The noise of the little cannon carried across the water and the reflections from the rockets twinkled in the river. Fools, Jordache thought, what’re they celebrating about? They never had it so good in their whole lives. They’d all be selling apples on street corners in five years, they’d be tearing each other to pieces on the lines outside factories waiting for jobs. If they had the brains they were born with they’d all be in the churches tonight praying that the Japanese would hold out for ten years. Then he saw the fire flare up suddenly on the hill outside

the town, a small, clear spurt of flame which quickly defined itself as a cross, burning on the rim of the horizon. He laughed. Business as usual and screw victory. Down with the Catholics, the Niggers, and the Jews, and don’t forget it. Dance tonight and burn tomorrow. America is America. We’re here and we’re telling you what the score really is.

Jordache took another drink, enjoying the spectacle of the flaming cross dominating the town, savouring in advance the mealy-mouthed lamentations that would appear tomorrow in the town’s two newspapers on the subject of the affront to the memory of the brave men of all races and creeds who had died defending the Meals on which America was founded. And the sermons on Sunday! It would almost be worthwhile to go to a church or two to listen to what the holy bastard would say.

If I ever find out who put up that cross, Jordache thought, I’m going to shake their hands.

As he watched, he saw the fire spread. There must have been a building right near the cross, down wind from it. It must have been good and dry, because in no time at all the whole sky was lit up.

In a little while, he heard the bells of the fire engines racing through the streets of the town and up the hill.

Not a bad night, Jordache thought, all things considered.

He took a last drink and then started to row leisurely towards the river bank.

Rudolph stood on the steps of the high school and waited for the boys at the cannon to shoot it off. There were hundreds of boys and girls milling around on the lawn, shouting, singing, kissing. Except for the kissing, it was very much like the Saturday nights after the team had won a big football game.

The cannon went off. A huge cheer went up.

Then Rudolph put his trumpet to his lips and began to play America’. First the crowd fell silent and the slow music rang out all alone, note by solemn note over their heads. Then they began to sing and in a moment all the voices joined in: ‘America, America, God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea.

There was a big cheer after the song was over and he began to play the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. He couldn’t stand still

while playing the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, so he began to march around the lawn. People fell in behind him and soon he was leading a parade of boys and girls, first around the lawn and then into the street, marching to the rhythm of his horn. The boys serving the cannon trundled it along at the head of the procession just behind him and at every intersection they stopped and fired it and the boys and girls cheered and grownups along the route applauded and waved flags at them.

Striding at the head of his army, Rudolph played ‘When the Caissons Go Rolling Along,’ and ‘Columbia the Gem of the Ocean’, and the highschool hymn, and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, as the parade wound its jubilant way through the streets of the town. He led them down towards Vanderhoff Street and stopped in front of the bakery and played, ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, for his mother’s sake. His mother opened the window upstairs and waved to him and he could see her dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. He ordered the boys at the cannon to give a salute to his mother and they fired the piece and the hundreds of boys and girls roared and his mother wept openly. He wished his mother had combed her hair before opening the window and it was too bad she never took the cigarette out of her mouth. There was no light from the cellar tonight, so he knew his father wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have known what to play for him. It would have been hard to choose the proper selection for a veteran of the German army on this particular night.

He would have liked to go out to the hospital and serenade his sister and her soldiers, but the hospital was too far away. With a last flourish for his mother, he led the parade towards the centre of town, playing ‘Boola-Boola’. Perhaps he would go to Yale when he finished school next year. Nothing was impossible tonight.

He didn’t really decide to do it, but he found himself on the street on which Miss Lenaut lived. He had stood outside the house often enough, hidden in the shadow of a tree across the street, looking up at the lighted window on the second floor which he knew was hers. The light was on now.

He stopped boldly in the middle of the street in front of the house, looking at the window. The narrow street with its modest two-family dwellings and tiny lawns was packed with his followers. He felt sorry for Miss Lenaut, alone, so far from home, thinking of her friends and relatives joyously flooding the streets of Paris at this moment. He wanted to make amends to the poor woman, show that he forgave her, demonstrate that there were depths to him she had never guessed, that he was more than a dirty little boy with a foul-mouthed German father, who specialised in pornographic drawings. He put the trumpet to his lips and began to play the Marseillaise. The complicated, triumphant music, with its memories of flags and battles, of desperation and heroism, rang in the shabby little street, and the boys and girls chanted along with it, without words, because they didn’t know the words. By God, Rudolph thought, no highschool teacher in Port Philip ever had anything like this happen to her before. He played it through straight once, but Miss Lenaut didn’t appear at the window. A girl with a blonde pigtail down her back came out of the house next door and stood near Rudolph, watching him play. Rudolph started all over again, but this time as a tricky solo, playing with rhythm, improvising, now soft and slow, now brassy and loud. Finally, the window opened. Miss Lenaut stood there, in a dressing gown. She looked down. He couldn’t see the expression on her face. He took a step so that the light of a street lamp illuminated him clearly and pointed his trumpet directly up at Miss Lenaut and played loud and clear. She had to recognise him. For another moment she listened, without moving. Then she slammed the window down and pulled the blind.

French cunt, he thought, and finished the ‘Marseillaise’ with a mocking sour note. He took the trumpet from his lips. The girl who had come out of the next door was standing next to him. She put her arm around his neck and kissed him. The boys and girls around him cheered and the cannon went off. He grinned. The kiss was delicious. He knew the girl’s address, too, now. He put the trumpet to his lips and began playing Tiger Rag’, as he marched, swinging, down the street. The boys and girls danced behind him in a gigantic swirling mass as they headed towards Main Street.