The Damned (17 page)

John watched them walk away, silhouetted against the car lights, and his wife was small beside the tall Danton. It gave him, for just a moment, a curious sense of loss. He tried to shrug it off.

He got back into the car and folded his arms across the top of the steering wheel, rested his forehead on his arms. “I did what you’d want me to do,” he said. And he waited a moment and the tears came. “All alone,” he said, and the tears came faster, channeling beside his nose, wet-salting his lips.

Such a damnable waste. Mamma was in her prime, really. Everybody respected her. We were such good pals. Just last year, coming home from school for vacation, and then having dinner, and Pauline in the kitchen clearing up afterward, and the way Mamma would give me that sly look across the room and without a word I’d set up the table and get the cards and the Russian-bank game would be on.

Or other nights, just listening to the records. Or reading to each other. If it wasn’t for Linda it could still have been that way. And then coming into my bedroom, tucking me in as though I were a little kid.

She told me a lot of things. She never told me what a dirtiness marriage is. How it humiliates your body. I can go back there alone and I can make myself well and whole again. I’ve got to get over Linda the way you get over an illness. And the house will be so desperately empty. There’s no good reason for Tommy to keep that sleazy little apartment. I can make it very inexpensive for him. That school certainly can’t pay him very well.

Tommy will know what I mean. He’s the one I’ll tell it all to. Every bit of it. I guess he still thinks of that time two years ago when we were both counselors at Camp Raedor, and that moonlight walk we took, when the whole world was an impossible silver, touching every leaf, and the beauty was so great it filled up your throat, and how it seemed so natural for us to walk hand in hand that night. Back in the lights it seemed odd to us that we’d done that, but it was right while we were in the moonlight. Tommy said then that true friendship can exist only between two men, and that women do not know the meaning of the word. He explained how a woman’s existence is so functional a thing, and tied in so grimly with the business of procreation, that there is no room in their souls for friendship as such. I argued the point with him, but now I know he was right. And Mamma was right. And I was blind and wrong. I’ll forget all those little scenes between Linda and me. Some of them will be hard to forget. They left deep scars.

His chin touched the horn ring and the horn blatted, shocking him with the noise. He slouched in the seat, resting his head on the back of the seat. The day had bitten deeply into his reserves of strength. There was a dull ache at the place where he had been struck by the gun barrel.

If he could take just a short nap, between ferry trips, it would help a lot. Mamma always said the way to relax and go to sleep quickly is to think of something beautiful. He thought of a moonlit garden at night, and a statue gleaming white in the moonlight. He could see it from the porch door of his uncle’s house. And he walked out, the dew cold against his bare feet.

There in the car, with his eyes closed, he could see the statue across the years. He moved closer to it. Now he was actually in the garden. He walked up to it, and it seemed as though he had never really looked at it before. Uncle was silly, calling it Diana, and calling it a girl. Anybody could see it was the marble statue of a young, clean-limbed boy. Flat white symmetry of chest, and the careful interweaving of the muscles of the flanks. He stood in the dream garden and the statue turned, bright and shocking and beautiful in its nakedness, pure in its perfect maleness. It stepped down from the pedestal and it held out its hand and he saw at once that it was Tommy, as he had known it would be. And he touched the firm cool hand, and Tommy spoke, calling him Linda. He tried to pull his hand away, protesting, but Tommy held it tightly, and he was Linda and John all at once, and he tilted his face upward…

“Sorry, Gerrold,” Danton said, joggling his elbow. “We’ll be second car on this load.”

John struggled up out of sleep, and the knowledge that Mamma was dead fell in on him, like the crashing of a tall white room. He sobbed aloud.

“Move over, boy,” Danton said gently. “I’ll run it aboard.”

PHIL DECKER walked up the road, through the night, away from the river, away from the cars, lifting his knees high with each stride, swinging his arms briskly. He walked away from the singing of the twins until there was no sound in all the world but the clip-tamp of his steps, the brush of fabric as the legs of the maroon shorts rubbed together.

No need to get excited about it. World’s full of them. Kids with stars in their eyes and a little talent and a lot of ambition. God, if all the young babes with a yen for show business were laid end to end—it would probably get them someplace. Whose joke was that? Manny’s? Sounded like him.

No need to think it was the end of the world. There were a lot of creeks and he’d been up most of them, spoon-less as usual, and landed on his feet. But it was the interruption that mattered this time. Damn it, a man gets old. How long to pick up more partners and shape them up for the assault on TV? Two years? Not much less, certainly. They say, “Where have you played?” and you got to have an answer. And by that time he’d be over fifty.

The twins were soft in the head. What could they do all alone? Go back to that corn-fed routine they were doing first time they were booked? Or maybe go into one of those showcase jobs? That isn’t an act. It isn’t talent. Just walk around slow in a thousand bucks’ worth of costume, giving the ringside baldies a glassy smile, and wagging those things God gave you, in a genteel way, and praying that one of the baldies wants to get closer than ringside, and the price for that is marriage. And backstage those big lovelies pop on the shell-rimmed glasses and read Proust or something, so that maybe if the baldie they get ever wants to talk, they can Proust the hell out of him.

It isn’t an act, damn it. Now that strip, that’s it. The only twin strip act on the road. The others can do it under water, or with birds, or with a tambourine, but I got the only strip twins in the business. I mean I had the only twins.

Talk them out of this craziness. The heat did it. The heat and this waiting. But I know them too well. They’re sort of bright, and they’re both stubborn. Hard as hell to make them change their minds. And this time they’re like iron. You can feel it.

Every time the breaks come along, the timing is bad. Hell, a few years back we could have booked on that Keith merry-go-round and made a million bucks and they wouldn’t have been unhappy.

Maybe they just can’t take that strip. They seemed to be getting used to it. That can’t be it. Just like old Billy Moscow. Remember how he picked up that lassy in Trenton? Dear Lord, how she was stacked! Ten days we spent, the two of us, trying to get her to do a strip. No, sir. Not that girl. Undress in front of
people?
she kept saying. And then a year later old Billy goes to Miami and what does he see but the same girl, calling herself Dixie Ravel, and not only is she doing a strip, but one with tassels that she gets spinning in opposite directions. A real talent. Billy was fit to be throat-cut over that.

I didn’t ask for no bumps and grinds out of those girls. That’s cheap stuff. Just a good dignified strip, and who the hell is going to fit into all those terrific expensive costumes now?

This next couple of years was going to be the good old days, for sure. Figured I had them coming to me. Thirty-three years of learning the timing. Thirty-three years. Gets so you can’t remember what happened where. Twenty years with Manny. Decker and Malone. Songs and frolic. Top billing at the Orpheum three times. Paid one little girl fifty bucks a week and all she ever had to do was walk across the stage twice. That was with the gag where Manny follows her lugging that forty pounds of ice in a pair of tongs and then come weaving back out with one little bitty ice cube in those tongs.

A lot of years and a lot of happening. Never forget the yell that went up that night in Kansas City. We were to come on next. That was when that Austrian was acting funny. He had good reason to. One of the acrobats had been getting to his wife and the Austrian had a good hunch. So with her out there against the board he throws the knives fine, and he throws two of the hatchets fine, and with that last hatchet he cuts her in half, right from the eyebrows up. Got away with it, too. Told the cops the night was so hot his hand got sweaty. Sobbing and carrying on. We all knew the score, but nobody would snitch to local cops. That acrobat was pretty irritated, and he got even in a way only an acrobat could think up. He waits until the Austrian gets himself another wife and target, and then he gets to her too. Last I heard, the Austrian cut his throat with one of his own knives.

Sixteen that year I started. A singer, yet. Serious about it. Trying too hard. Then with the rose-colored spot on me, and singing something about somebody’s mother, I swung my arm and knocked the prop loose on the baby grand and it came down and damn near broke my wrist. My God, the yuk that went up! Did something to me. So we put it in the act, and from then on I’m a comic. Had a big leather thing under my sleeve so that lid could come down with a real bang.

Billed with the best. Cantor and Berle’s mother. Mickey Rooney when he was a three-year-old squirt stealing the stage from his whole damn family. All the vaudeville, and then the burlesque years, and then, with Manny gone, doing the singles in clubs.

Bert Lahr and that damn n-guh, n-guh, n-guh noise of his. All he had was the right break. Like Ed Wynn. And Joe Brown. Hell, I’m only forty-nine. That Lahr is right up there and he must be older than God. There’s a lot of years left. Manny and I, and that thousand a week for damn near eight years. Half a million bucks and where did it go? We lived good because it was going to last forever, and Manny kept needling me for saving up dough and he was right, because as soon as I had fifty thousand bucks that bitch Christine busts in on me with two witnesses when I’m with that little girl—can’t even remember her name or how it was. I hope it was good, because the settlement on Christine was fifty thousand bucks, a considerable amount to pay for one little tumble. Manny laughed so hard he couldn’t hardly stand up and he told me that’s what I get for saving money.

It was going to last forever and somehow it didn’t. I got my health and the car and fifteen hundred bucks and a load of costumes. No time to give up, Phil boy. But you can wonder about that health angle. I know I ought to see a doc. The way my left arm keeps going numb every once in a while, and when it’s numb, I can’t seem to get enough air in my lungs when I take a breath. Hell, that isn’t enough of a symptom to bother a doc with. No pain. I’m as tough as I ever was.

Say, I must have walked a mile and a half. Stop and take a breather. Lot of stars in the sky. Makes you feel tiny, like you’re on stage in the biggest damn theatre in the world. Stars always make me think of backdrops, of the ceiling of clubs. Funny how all the time they want to go making decorations that look like stars.

Make jokes out here and you don’t get much of a laugh, that’s for sure.

Why did they have to do it to me?

Well, I let them know I can get along fine without them. Fine and dandy. Hard to find twins for an act, though.

Doesn’t pay to be alone. Makes you gloomy. Making me wonder just what in the hell I’ll do if I can’t whump up another act. Nobody to go to. No trade but the one I got. Some tired costumes and a car that needs a motor overhaul, and a headful of jokes and lyrics. A million of them. Name any object and I can give you three gags on it, clean or blue. Fountain pen, post office, mallard duck. Any object. Can’t remember where the gag came from. Got a hundred ways to squelch hecklers. Please, mister, do I come over to where you work and keep joggling your shovel? Lady, please, we both got professions. Yours is just a little older than mine.

I’ll kill ’em in the old men’s home. They’ll rock and cackle, rock and cackle, all day long. That Decker feller, he’s sure a card.

I’ve slept in ten thousand beds, drunk a thousand barrels of liquor, bounced more hundreds of women than I want to think about. I’ve made a half million bucks and spent all of it but fifteen hundred. I’ve never cheated a friend, or chiseled a buck, or kicked over a baby carriage. Why do I stand here hitching? Just because a pair of stacked blondes double-crossed me. Couple of years from now I won’t even remember their names or what they look like. Couple of years from now they’ll see this ugly puss on magazine covers and know they pulled the craziest stunt in the world. My pattern can’t miss. It can’t miss. It’s what people want. A little music, a little skin, a touch of the blue. They want visual gags, and that’s perfect for TV. Maybe I can get a single on TV. Wouldn’t take much practice to work up that thing I used to do years ago. Leon Errol, God rest his soul, used to do it better. Old rubber legs.

Let me see, I’m carrying the glass like this, and I do the rubber-leg deal, coming on, drinking what’s in the glass and leaving that big chunk of glass that looks like ice. I get the hiccups. I get them so bad, like this, while I’m staggering around, that the ice goes way up in the air, and each time I get the glass in the way and it falls back in. Then comes a big hiccup and the ice goes up and I turn around and it drops right into that gap at the back of my pants. Now let’s see…

There in the starlight, in the middle of the empty road, in the middle of the empty burned land, the little man staggered and weaved and hiccupped, holding an imaginary glass. After a big hiccup he stood very still, his face showing wonderment. He looked into the glass, then looked around the TV stage. No ice. Wonderment turned slowly to shock, and then to consternation. He did a wild, gesticulating dance, and quite suddenly stopped.

He shook his left arm as though trying to flip water from the fingertips. He massaged his left hand hard, breathing deeply. He rubbed his arm for a time and then turned toward the river and walked back.