Rich Man, Poor Man (34 page)

The two men went up the walk to the front door and Harold rang the bell. He took off his hat and held it across Ms chest, almost as if he were saluting the flag. Axel kept his cap on.

The door opened and a maid stood there. Mr Chase was expecting them, she said,

They take millions of clean-limbed young boys.’ The poacher was chewing on a wad of tobacco and spitting into a tin can on the floor beside him, as he talked. ‘Clean-limbed boys, and send them off to kill and maim each other with inhuman instruments of destruction and they congratulate themselves and hang their chests with medals and parade down the main thoroughfares of the city and they put me in jail and mark me as an enemy of society because every once in a while I drift out into the woodlands of America and shoot myself a choice buck with an old 1010 Winchester 22.’ The poacher originally had come from the Ozarks and he spoke like a country preacher.

There were four bunks in the cell, two on one side and two on the other. The poacher, whose name was Dave, was lying in his bunk and Thomas was lying in the lower bunk on the other side of the cell. Dave smelted rather ripe and Thomas preferred to keep some space between them. It was two days now that they had been in the cell together and Thomas knew quite a Mt about Dave, who lived alone in a shack near the lake and appreciated a permanent audience. Dave had come down from the Ozarks to work in the automobile industry in Detroit and after fifteen years of it had had enough. ‘I was in there in the paint department’ Dave said, ‘in the stink of chemicals and the heat of a furnace, devoting my numbered days on this earth to spraying paint on cars for people who didn’t mean a fart in hell to me to ride around in and the

spring came and the leaves burgeoned and the summer came and the crops were taken in and the autumn came and city folk in funny caps with hunting licences and fancy guns were out in the woods shooting the deer and I might just as well have been down in the blackest pit, chained to a post, for all the difference the seasons meant to me. I’m a mountain man and I pined away and one day I saw where my path laid straight before me and I took to the woods. A man has to be careful with his numbered days on this earth, son. There is a conspiracy to chain every living child of man to an iron post in a black pit, and you mustn’t be fooled because they paint it all the bright colours of the rainbow and pull all sorts of devilish tricks to make you think that it isn’t a pit, it isn’t an iron post, it isn’t a chain. The president of General Motors, up high in his glorious office, was just as much chained, just as deep down in the pit as me coughing up violet in the paint shop.’

Dave spat tobacco juice into the tin can on the floor next to his bunk. The gob of juice made a musical sound against the side of the can.

‘I don’t ask for much,’ Dave said, ‘just an occasional buck and the smell of woodsy air in my nostrils. I don’t blame nobody for putting me in jail from time to time, that’s their profession just like hunting is my profession, and I don’t begrudge ‘em the coupla months here and there spent behind bars. Somehow, they always seem to catch me just as the winter months’re drawing on, so it’s really no hardship. But nothing they say can make me feel like a criminal, no sir. Fm an American out in the American forest livin’ off American deer. They want to make all sorts of rules and regulations for those city folk in the gun clubs, that’s all right by me. They don’t apply, they just don’t apply.’

He spat again. There’s just one thing that makes me a mite forlorn - and that’s the hypocrisy. Why, once the very judge that condemned me had eaten venison I shot the week before and ate it right at the dining-room table in his own house and it was bought with his own money by his own cook. The hypocrisy is the canker in the soul of the American people. Why, just look at your case, son. What did you do? You did what everybody knows he’d do if he got the chance - you were offered a nice bit of juicy tail and you took it. At your age, son, the lions’re raging, and the rules in the book don’t make a never-no-mind. I bet that the very judge who is going to put you away for years of your young life, if he got the offer from those two little plum-assed young girls you told me about, if that same judge got the offer and was certain sure nobody was around to see him, he’d go cavoting with those plump-assed young girls like a crazy goat. Like the judge who ate my venison. Statutory rape.’ Dave spat in disgust. ‘Old man’s rules. What does a little twitching young tail know about statutory? It’s the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy everywhere.’

Joe Kuntz appeared at the cell door and opened it. ‘Come on out, Jordache,’ Kuntz said. Ever since Thomas had told the lawyer Uncle Harold had got for him that Joe Kuntz had been in there with the twins, too, and Kuntz had heard the news, the policeman had not been markedly friendly. He was married, with three kids.

Axel Jordache was waiting in Horvath’s office with Uncle Harold and the lawyer. The lawyer was a worried-looking young man with a bad complexion and thick glasses. Thomas had never seen his father looking so bad, not even the day he hit him.

He waited for his father to say hello, but Axel kept quiet, so he kept quiet, too.

Thomas,’ the lawyer said, ‘I am happy to say that everything has been arranged to everybody’s satisfaction.’

‘Yeah,’ Horvath said behind the desk. He didn’t sound terribly satisfied. ‘You’re a free man, Thomas,’ the lawyer said. Thomas looked doubtfully at the five men in the room. There were no signs of celebration on any of the faces. ‘You mean I can just walk out of this joint?’ Thomas asked. ‘Exactly,’ the lawyer said.

‘Let’s go,’ Axel Jordache said. ‘I wasted enough time in this goddamn town as it is.’ He turned abruptly and limped out.

Thomas had to make himself walk slowly after his father. He wanted to cut and run for it, before anybody changed his mind.

Outside it was sunny late afternoon. There were no windows in the cell and you couldn’t tell what the weather was from in there. Uncle Harold walked on one side of Thomas and his father on the other. It was another kind of arrest

They got into Uncle Harold’s car. Axel sat up in front and Thomas had the back seat all to himself. He didn’t ask any questions.

I bought your way out, in case you’re curious,’ his father said. His father didn’t turn in the seat, but talked straight ahead, at the windshield. ‘Five thousand dollars to mat Shylock

for his pound of flesh. I guess you got the highest-priced lay in history. I hope it was worth it.’

Thomas wanted to say he was sorry, that somehow, some day, he’d make it up to his father. But the words wouldn’t come out

‘Don’t think I did it for you,’ his father said, ‘or for Harold here….’

‘Now, Axel,’ Harold began.

‘You could both die tonight and it wouldn’t spoil my appetite,’ his father said. ‘I did it for the only member of the family that’s worth a damn - your brother Rudolph. I’m not going to have him start out in life with a convict brother hanging around his neck. But this is the last time I ever want to see you or hear from you. I’m taking the train home now and that’s the end of you and me. Do you get that?’

‘I get it,’ Thomas said flatly.

‘You’re getting out of town, too,’ Uncle Harold said to Thomas. His voice was quivering. That’s the condition Mr Chase made and I couldn’t agree with him more. Ill take you home and you pack your things and you don’t sleep another night in my house. Do you get that too?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Thomas said. They could have the town. Who needed it?

There was no more talking. When Uncle Harold stopped the car at the station, his father got out without a word and limped away, leaving the door of the car open. Uncle Harold had to reach over and slam it shut.

In the bare room under the roof, there was a small, battered valise on his bed. Thomas recognised it. It belonged to Clothilde. The bed was stripped down and the mattress rolled up, as though Tante Elsa was afraid that he might sneak in a few minutes sleep on it. Tante Elsa and the girls were not in the house. To avoid contamination, Tante Elsa had taken the girls to the movies for the afternoon.

Thomas threw his things into the bag quickly. There wasn’t much. A few shirts and underwear and socks, an extra pair of shoes and a sweater. He took off the garage uniform that he had been arrested in and put on the new grey suit Tante Elsa bad bought for him on his birthday.

He looked around the room. The book from the library, Riders of the Purple Sage, was lying on a table. They kept sending postcards saying he was overdue and they were charging him two cents a day. He must owe them a good ten bucks by now. He threw the book into the valise. Remember Elysium, Ohio.

He closed the valise and went downstairs and into the kitchen. He wanted to thank Clothilde for the valise. But she wasn’t in the kitchen.

We went out through the hallway. Uncle Harold was eating a big piece of apple pie in the dining-room, standing up. His hands were trembling as he picked up the pie. Uncle Harold always ate when he was nervous. ‘If you’re looking for Clothilde,’ Uncle Harold said, ‘save your energy. I sent her to the movies with Tante Elsa and the girls.’

Well, Thomas thought, at least she got a movie out of me. One good thing.

‘You got any money?’ Uncle Harold asked. ‘I don’t want you to be picked up for vagrancy and go through the whole thing again.’ He wolfed at his applie pie.

‘I have money,’ Thomas said. He had twenty-one dollars and change.

‘Good. Give me your key.’

Thomas took the key out of his pocket and put it on the table. He had an impulse to push the rest of the pie in Uncle Harold’s face, but what good would that do?

They stared at each other. A piece of pie dribbled down Uncle Harold’s chin.

‘Kiss Clothilde for me,’ Thomas said, and went out of the door, carrying Clothilde’s valise.

He walked to the station and bought twenty dollars’ worth of transportation away from Elysium, Ohio.

The cat stared at him from its corner, malevolent and unblinking. Its enemies were interchangeable. Whoever came down in the cellar each night, to work in the hammering heat, was regarded by the cat with the same hatred, the same topaz lust for death in his yellow eyes. The cat’s night-long cold stare disconcerted Rudolph as he put the rolls in the oven. It made

him uneasy when he was not liked, even by an animal. He had tried to win the cat over with an extra bowl of milk, with caresses, with a ‘Nice, kitty,’ here and there, but the cat knew it wasn’t a nice kitty and lay there, its tail twisting, contemplating murder.

Axel had been-gone for three days now. There had been no word from Elysium and there was no telling how many more nights Rudolph would have to come down into the cellar and face the heat, the flour dust, the arm-numbing lifting and shoving and hauling. He didn’t know how his father could stand it. Year in and year out. After only three nights, Rudolph was almost completely worn out, with purplish bruises of fatigue under his eyes and face haggard. And he still had to take the bicycle and deliver the rolls in the morning. And school after that. There was an important exam in Math the next day and he hadn’t been able to prepare for it and he never was all that good in Math anyway.

Sweating, fighting the greasy, huge trays, the flour smearing shakily over his bare arms and face, after three nights he was his father’s ghost, staggering under the punishment his father had endured six thousand nights. Good son, faithful son. Shit on that. Bitterly, he regretted the fact that he had come down to help his father on holidays, when there was a rush on, and had learned, approximately, his father’s profession. Thomas had been wiser. Let the family go to hell. Whatever trouble Thomas was in now (Axel had not told Rudolph what it was when he got the telegram from Elysium), Thomas just had to be better off than the dutiful son in the blazing cellar.

As for Gretchen, just walking across a stage three times a week for sixty dollars a week….

In the last three nights Rudolph had figured out approximately how much the Jordache Bakery earned. About sixty dollars a week, on the average, after rent and expenses, and the thirty dollars for salary for the widow who took care of the shop now that Ms mother was sick.

He remembered the bill for more than twelve dollars that Boylan had paid in the restaurant in New York, and all the money for drinks that one night.

Boylan had gone down to Hobe Sound, in Florida, for two months. Now that the war was over, life was returning to normal.

He put another tray of rolls into the oven.

He was awakened by the sound of voices. He groaned. Five o’clock so soon? He got out of bed mechanically. He noticed that he was dressed. He shook his head stupidly. How could he be dressed? He looked Wearily at Ms watch. A-quarter to six. Then he remembered. It wasn’t morning. He had come home from school and thrown himself on the bed to get some rest before the night’s work. He heard his father’s voice. His father must have come home while he was asleep. His first thought was selfish. I don’t have to work tonight He lay down again.

The two voices, the one high and excited, the other low and explaining, came up from downstairs. His father and mother were fighting. He was too tired to care. But he couldn’t go to sleep, with all that noise downstairs, so he listened.

Mary Pease Jordache was moving out She wasn’t moving far. Just to Gretchen’s room across the hall. She stumbled back and forth, her legs hurting from the phlebitis, carrying dresses, underwear, sweaters, shoes, combs, photographs of the children when they were young, Rudolph’s scrapbook, a sewing kit, Gone With the Wind, a rumpled package of Camels, old handbags. Everything she owned, getting it out of the room she had hated for twenty years and piling everything on Gretchen’s unmade bed, raising a small cloud of dust every time she came in with a new load in her arms.

She kept up a surging monologue as she went back and forth. ‘I’m through with this room. Twenty years too late, but I’m finally through. No one shows any consideration for me, I’m going to go my own way from now on. I am not going to be at the disposal of a fool. A man who travels halfway across the country to give away five thousand dollars to a perfect stranger. The savings of a lifetime. My lifetime. I slaved, day in and day out I denied myself everything, I became an old woman, to save that money. My son was going to go to college, my son was going to be a gentleman. But now he’s not going anywhere, he’s not going to be anything, my brilliant husband had to show what a great man he was - handing out thousand dollar bills to millionaires in Ohio, so that his precious brother and his fat wife wouldn’t be embarrassed when they went to the opera in their Lincoln Continental.’