The Brotherhood of the Grape (7 page)

“You ever had a bath before?” the medic asked.

“I used to bathe all the time.”

“Put your clothes on the chair and follow me.”

I spilled my rags on the chair and went down the hall with him to a shower. He handed me a bar of soap and a towel. I got under the hot water. It was as close to heaven as I had ever been. It stopped the shaking and I began to see the pink of my flesh. I toweled off and walked back to the emergency room. The cops were still there, smoking and talking to the doctor. I lay on the table and he dabbed the wounds with a yellowish antiseptic as the old cop began to question me: name, address, draft status.

Quietly he asked, “How long you been doing this?”

I looked at him. “Doing what?”

“Indecent exposure.”

I sat up.

“Never!”

I was shaking again as I told about the crab attack. They were amused but not convinced. I thrust out my arms, my legs, to show the gouged flesh. The cops were not impressed.

“Could be self-inflicted,” the old cop said, turning to the doctor. “What do you think, Doc?”

My gut hardened and my eyes devoured the medic. He had been rather friendly and dispassionate, a professional but not a cop. I screamed at him.

“Tell them!”

He looked from me to the two cops, then turned back to swabbing the wounds. “I don’t believe they’re self-inflicted,” he said. “But I don’t think he was attacked by crabs either.”

I felt the grief in my chest, the turmoil to break into tears. God almighty, don’t make me cry. God keep me a man like my father!

Suddenly the old cop jumped away.

“Jesus Christ!” he said, looking down at the floor. Crawling toward him, skittering across the gleaming tile floor, was a crab. Another was moving frantically toward the crack in the door. A third crawled out of the leg of my pants, his feelers moving as he checked the strange territory. I cried then. I sat up and held my knees and cried because everybody was so fucking rotten, and the only ones coming to my rescue were the little beasties who had caused all the trouble in the first place, the crabs.

My outburst chilled the cops. They backed out of the room and returned to the squad car. Through the window I saw them sitting in the front seat, heads back, caps pulled over their eyes.

The medic washed his hands. He looked disturbed as he dried them on a towel. “Let’s have a look at those crab bites again,” he suggested, murmuring to himself as he probed here and there.

“I think I’ll give you a tetanus shot,” he said. “You ever had one?” I told him yes, a couple of years ago. Turning me over on my stomach, he jabbed a hypodermic into my butt. It hurt and I sat up.

“Is that all?”

“Not quite. I’m giving you penicillin too.”

I took it in the arm.

“Okay. You can get dressed.”

I picked up my sand-laden pants. They were obscene and disgusting as I held them in the air.

“If the cops don’t mind, I’d just as soon have their blanket.”

“I’ll fix that,” the medic said.

He walked down the hall and returned with a pair of Levi’s, a gray sweatshirt, shorts and socks. They were old but clean. I thanked him and got dressed as he chased the crabs around with a rag saturated in chloroform.

We said so long and I walked out to the police car and was driven to the Wilmington Substation of the L.A.P.D. I was booked on a charge of vagrancy. They put me in a holding cell with four other criminals, and around noon the police van hauled us to Lincoln Heights Jail in Los Angeles.

I thought of the Toyo Fish Company and all that it had promised, and how beautiful it was, rotting away there on the dock, all tin and stinking enchantingly of fish and bilge and scum and tar, and I thought fondly of Coletti, who believed in me, and I wondered if I was really as old as I felt. I looked at the other prisoners in the van. They had been arrested for brawling—their eyes blackened, some with bandaged heads and knuckles. What a sad bunch we were, riding off in the warm sunshine.

We ended our journey in the drunk tank at Lincoln Heights, an oversized cell where tired, waiting men slumped on wooden benches, shriveled in their clothes.

The next morning fifty of us were marched before the judge in Sunrise Court. When my name was called I stepped forward and pleaded guilty to the charge of vagrancy. There wasn’t much choice. Had I pleaded innocent without the necessary bail, the court would have confined me for two months while I waited for a trial date and the assignment of a public defender. The judge fined me ten dollars or five days.

The fourth morning of my term I woke to see an old acquaintance, brought in during the night. It was Crazy Hernandez, the dishwashing writer, sitting on his bunk smoking a cigarette. He leaped at me like a beloved friend, dancing me around the cell. Hernandez was charged with marijuana possession. Not only was he charged with it, he was actually smoking it, the joint concealed in his cupped hands. That explained his enthusiasm at our reunion. Taking advantage of his euphoria, I asked him to loan me some money.

“All I got!” He pulled off his shoe, dug a bill from inside, and slapped it into my hand. A dollar. “There’s more where that came from!” he boasted. It was not so. I saw the inside of the shoe and there was nothing more within.

Oh, that Hernandez! He would never know what his dollar meant to me the morning I was sprung—a ride on the Big Red Car back to the harbor, no hitchhiking, no dread of being snatched again by the cops, a ride back to the Toyo Fish Company and my friend Coletti.

He was studying some papers at his desk.

I said, “Hi, Mr. Coletti.”

“I thought you wanted to work.”

“I was sick, in the hospital.”

“You look sick now.”

“I’m okay.”

“See Julio in the warehouse.”

Julio was the straw boss over the labor crew—ten men, six Mexicans, four Filipinos. They were loading a railroad car with cartons of canned tuna. I pitched in. They tossed those cartons as if they were basketballs, laughing and horsing around. I had to boost each one with the last of my strength. It was a long day, and when it was over I could not close my fingers.

I went back to Coletti’s office. He was slipping into his coat. “Well?”

“Could you pay me for today?”

“We don’t do that here.”

“I have to get a room.”

“Jesus, you’re a lot of trouble.”

But he gave me six dollars from the cash drawer.

I
WAS A FAILURE
at the Toyo Fish Company. A disgrace to myself. I could not pack it. The work was too much for me. At eighteen, in my last year of high school, my weight had been 160 pounds, not a big man but a solid, stumpy man with hard muscles and strong legs, a tough halfback, a swift baseball player. In the cannery it was another kind of game. The wiry Filipinos, the tireless Mexicans, made a counterfeit of me and I was ashamed, lashing myself in futility. They hoisted 100-pound sacks of rock salt with ease while I staggered with a blue face and let them slip from my grasp. They shoveled crushed ice by the hour while I rested, out of breath. My boss, Julio, observed quietly and said nothing. The other men saw it too, and pretended not to see it. They were waiting out the ordeal, waiting for me to throw in the towel. Even Coletti began to appear, watching the work from a doorway, looking a moment and then walking away. A day came when we had to clear tons of ice from the hold of a half-sunk tuna clipper. In hip boots we slushed in ice water for two days. I stopped to rest on a pile of sacks and fell asleep. Julio wakened me. The job had been finished, the ice cleared away. I was cold and shivering. Coletti wanted to see me.

“You’re fired,” he said, handing me a paycheck.

I had been with the Toyo Fish Company for two weeks and two days. The check was in full payment for the third week.

“A little bonus,” Coletti said.

What now? A man who could not even shovel fish fertilizer, where did I fit in the world? I remembered another lifetime, the holy hours with Dostoyevsky, and I knew it could never be that way again. A janitor, maybe? A little tobacco shop? A bellhop? My grandfather, my father’s father. He had been an itinerant knife-sharpener in Abruzzi. Was that my destiny too? Suddenly I wanted to go home, to my father’s house, to my mother’s arms, to her minestrone, to my old bed, to lie there the rest of my life. But it was impossible. How could I face them? I had written a few letters home those first days—all fabrications, all lies. I could never confront them now.

It was good timing. I arrived in San Elmo three hours after the flu hit me. My mother turned from the kitchen sink to find me in the doorway.

“Henry! My God, what happened?”

She put me to bed. She brought hot soup. She called Dr. Maselli. He left antibiotics. I wakened and my father looked down at me.

“How do you feel?”

“Great,” I said.

“How long you gonna stay?”

“Long as I can.”

“You wanna work for me?”

“Not right this moment.”

“Sleep. We’ll talk later.”

I ate and slept. Sometimes I slept and ate. Then my colon tightened. My mother brought me an enema bag. The potion didn’t work. She brought another. I locked the bathroom door and applied it. Success! It roared from me. On the other side of the door my mother applauded. “Thank God, oh, thank God!”

It was as if the purge had burst away all that troubled me—the poisons of the body, the abominations of the soul. In the morning I felt clean and pure. I set up a bridge table by the window and started to write.

I wrote in longhand, on lined paper in a grade school tablet, for of typewriters I knew nothing nor cared. My penmanship sufficed, for neat it was, painstaking and clean. In two days it was done: a short story about the Toyo Fish Company, the boys and girls who worked there, and of a love affair between my boss Jose and a Mexican girl. When it was done I paused to see what I had wrought. No, it was not Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I didn’t know what it was. A pastiche. It was Jack London, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald. It even showed traces of Henry Molise. A marvel, a thing of beauty. What to do with it? Where could I realize the most money?
The Saturday Evening Post
, of course. I sent it off, tablet and all.

It was returned so quickly I wondered if it had ever left town and gone all the way to Philadelphia and back. I smiled at the rejection slip. It didn’t matter. I had another story ready to mail. The new one went off to
The Saturday Evening Post
, the other to
Collier’s
. In two months—fending off the old man with one hand and writing with the other—I completed five stories about the cannery, about Los Angeles harbor, about Filipinos and Mexicans. Not a word of appreciation from the
Post
or
Collier’s
. Not a human written line acknowledging my existence. Minutely I examined every page of the rejected manuscripts. Not so much as a fingerprint or smudge, not a mark. A bad time. The old man watched me as he would an unwanted dog that had to be dealt with, a dog that ate too much and left fur on the sofa. There was a time when he growled because I read too much. Now he snarled because I wrote too much. It came down to that last valiant effort. I finished the story of Crazy Hernandez and rushed it to the Post. With it went my last hopes for escaping brick and stone and cement. The story sped back even faster than the others, it seemed, and I sat on the porch steps and tore open the brown envelope. I got a shock. There was a letter affixed to the manuscript. It read:

I forced myself to walk slowly to the
San Elmo Journal
. There was this exploding heartbeat in my throat, the fear I would drop in the street with the story of Crazy Hernandez clutched in my arms. I handed it to Art Cohen, the
Journal
editor and my high school English instructor. He led me to a typewriter in the rear of the office and sat me before it. For half an hour he instructed me on the operation of a typewriter. Then I was on my own. It had taken me two days to write the Crazy Hernandez story. It took me ten days to type it without errors. What matter, ten days? When the check came I would go to San Francisco and find a room in North Beach. I would buy a typewriter, set it up before a window overlooking the bay, and write. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying a hod, mixing mud, and mucking around in wet concrete.

What’s that, Dostoyevsky? You don’t approve of
The Saturday Evening Post?
Well, let me tell you something, Fyodor. I saw your journalistic pieces of 1875, and frankly, they were pretty tacky and commercial, but they brought you plenty of rubles. So let’s not blush at the Post story. You have done worse in your time…

I lay there in the darkness, in the cradle of my mother’s mattress breathing the sweet essence of her hair, and there he was again, my tireless old man, still trying to drag me into those deadly mountains where the concrete waited and some fool wanted a smokehouse built. So it had come down to this. After thirty years I had seen the light. I was a hod carrier at long last.

N
OISE WAKENED ME
in the morning—the shuffle of thick shoes past my window, the tumble of lumber, bellowing voices, laughter. The sun was up, hot and full of mischief as it tried to pierce the blinds.

I found an old flannel robe of my mother’s in the closet and walked out on the front porch. Zarlingo, Cavallaro and my father were hauling building materials to the Datsun out front and lifting them into the camper—planks, shovels, mortarboards, a wheelbarrow, tools. They sweated in the morning heat; the back of Papa’s khaki shirt was soaked down the spine, his face as red as a rose.

They paused at the truck to wipe their faces and sip beer from cans. The sky was a cloudless sheet of blue fire, tremulous, vast. It was a minute or so before they saw me.

“Ain’t you dressed yet?” my father said.

“No, I ain’t dressed yet.”

“Why don’t you get dressed like everybody else?”

“I just woke up. Do you mind?”

“You workin’ for me or not?”

“We’re not in the mountains yet.”

Zarlingo looked inside the camper.

“Oh shit. We’re outa beer.”

“Let’s go down to the Roma,” Papa said. “I like that tap beer better.” He squinted at me through the burning sunlight. “Put on some clothes. That’s your mother’s robe. Take it off. We leave in an hour. You be ready.”

They climbed into the cab, Zarlingo behind the wheel. I didn’t like the look of it. The air was shimmering with diabolic vibrations. As the camper moved off I yelled. Zarlingo braked to a stop and I walked to the car. Nick put his head out the window.

“What’s the matter now?”

I nodded at his two friends. “Are these two winos working for you too? If they are, I resign right now.”

“Resign?” he exploded. “You ain’t even started!”

“Well, are they, or are they not?”

Zarlingo put a placating hand on Papa’s knee to defuse him. “Let me talk to the lad, Nick.” He turned to me. “Look, sonny. We’re not working for your dad.”

I said, “Don’t call me sonny.”

“We’re just trying to give him a hand,” he went on. “Okay, buster? So why don’t you shut up and bug off?”

“Mannaggia!” my father howled, tumbling from the car and facing me nose to nose, splashing me with spit. “What are you tryin’ to do to me? These fellas are my friends. They’re doin’ me a favor, hauling all my stuff to the job free of charge, so what right you got to talk like that? Use your head. Show some respect.”

Injured and affronted, Zarlingo and Cavallaro looked straight ahead. I didn’t care how Papa defended them, they were mean, malevolent old bastards and it was impossible to be civil to them, but I said it anyway, merely to make peace.

“I’m sorry.”

They remained rigid and outraged. My father got back into the cab. “Let’s get outa here,” he said. Zarlingo shifted gears, and as the car moved off Papa stuck his head out the window.

“Get dressed, goddamnit. And take off that robe.”

I shuddered from it, those dreadful vibrations: there was something stupid and inexorable about the whole matter, a trap, a dark hole alive with rattlesnakes. Then and there I should have fled the scene, even in my mother’s old flannel robe I should have grabbed the first bus out of town.

Instead I showered and shaved and put on the ancient garments of my youth—corduroys, a sweatshirt, a pair of misshapen hobnail boots. How bizarre it was, the feeling inside those old clothes, a snake shedding his skin only to find an older skin beneath. I felt like an old man of sixteen.

They puzzled my mother. She didn’t care for them.

“You look too young,” she said.

“They feel crazy.”

I wanted to say they felt like the garments of someone who had died, the time of my young manhood, a time of stress and crisis, the family poverty in the midst of my father’s prosperity, the rage at him, the conviction that God did not rule the world after all, the hunger to lust and achieve, to jump the fences of home and town, to change myself into somebody else, to write, to fuck and write.

Eating breakfast I sensed a change of perspective growing out of the change of clothing—the same knives and forks of my youth, the same plates, the smooth worn handle of the same bread knife, the aging crucifix hanging above the stove—all things old and smooth and soft as the inside of my mother’s hand. She watched as I sipped coffee, her eyes troubled, uncertain of my identity.

“You don’t have to work for your father. Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“I know.”

“Do what’s right—for yourself.”

The morality of it was not the question. What mattered was that I had seen death glowing through the face of an old man clinging fiercely to life. No wonder he was stubborn, capricious, self-serving and touched with madness. But he was still my father. If I turned from him in his last cry for achievement it might bring a swifter death, and I did not want that shadow over the rest of my life. I had never actually refused to go to the mountains with him. I had simply allowed him and my mother to draw me into the plan. My father was entitled to this last paltry triumph, this little house of stone in the Sierras.