The Lime Twig (9 page)

“Shut up,” said the man in the chair, “he’s got more than that.”

And over the heads of all those standing behind them, he saw the profile of Margaret’s face. When he jumped,
took the first long stride, he kicked something under his foot and in a moment knew it to be the young woman’s powder case, without looking down, heard the tinkle and scrape of the contents scattering.

“Here, don’t be rude…,” he heard the older woman say, and he was pushing, pushing away into the midst of them. And still there was the face and he gasped, slipped between two men in black, tried not to lose her, raised a hand. Here was surprise and familiarity, not out of fear, but fondness, and between them both perhaps three hundred others not moving, not caring what they lost in the sun.

“My God, what have they done to Margaret!” Because, for the moment only he saw the whole of her and she was wearing clothes he had never seen before—an enormous flower hat and a taffy-colored gown with black-beaded tassels sewn about the waist and sewn also just above the bottom that was dragging. A dress from another age, too large, too old, Margaret clothed in an old tan garden gown and lost. “She’s not yet thirty,” he thought, shoving, using his elbow, “where’s their decency?” Then she was gone and he shouted.

“Watch who you’re colliding with, young cock,” said a voice in his ear.

He reached the spot where she had stood, but only a man, somebody’s butler, with a small child on his shoulders, moved in her place now, and the man refused to talk. The child looked down at Banks.

So he turned, stumbled, and near the east corner of the stand saw the last of the taffy bade rushing like the ghost
of a doe, and they were hustling her—another woman and a man. “Wait!” he was only thinking it, “wait!” Here was the first taste from the cup of panic, seeing the girl, his wife, pulled suddenly away from him by an arm. When he reached the spot he found that Margaret had been caught at the top of the stairs leading down to the five swinging doors of the Men’s, and he stopped, drew back, put his hand on the rail. A cigarette flung in anger, haste, was burning down there near one of the vaulted doors and he thought he could hear still the old public squeak of the hinge. He could not descend those stairs, and once more he was tasting lime. In the cool shadow he leaned, clutched the dusty iron, closed his eyes.

“Mr. Banks.” It was Cowles, accompanied by Needles dressed in his silks. “Why, Mr. Banks, you’d better take care in the sun. Ain’t that right, Jimmy?”

“I saw her…,” he managed to say.

“Who’s that, Mr. Banks?”

“I saw my wife. …”

“Well, too bad for that, Mr. Banks, as the fellow says. Ain’t that right, Jimmy?”

“They took her into the Men’s.”

“Unlikely, I should say. You’d better watch the sun, Mr. Banks. Come now,” and he could hear the jockey shuffling his little boots, “come, you’d better join us at the Baths. They’re bracing, Mr. Banks, very bracing. …”

“Fool,” shaking the white gown in his face, “you fool!”

“But she pilfered the trunk, I tell you.”

“I never let it happen … but you did. You fool!”

“And what’s so smart about having a trunk full of clothes in the hall when you’re trying to keep her naked?”

“Don’t say smart to me, smart as a naked girl, you are! And I can’t even take a slip to watch the Bumpy Girl without you letting her at a trunk full of clothes that would keep us all in style.”

“You wasn’t supposed to be taking a slip. You was supposed to stay.”

“Don’t throw it back at me, don’t give us that! Just wait ’til Larry hears how it was you who was lax, you wait. …”

“Ah, Dora, I can’t keep awake all day.”

Michael Banks and Cowles and the jockey in his colors walked past the Booter’s, past the barn and millinery shops until they reached the Baths, where they found the constable’s two-wheeler leaning against the marble wall with water dripping from one of the iron pipes down to its greasy seat. A few bees were circling the klaxon and the water made a rusty summer’s pool on the leather.

“Look out,” said Cowles, “the old constable’s after his cleanliness again.”

“He’s been drinking,” the jockey said. “He wants to sweat away the beer. That’s all.”

The entrance to the Baths was on an alley. The
building was of whitewashed stone and marble, and once, years before, the entire alley side had served as a sign. Now on the dirty white the paint was faded, but most of the letters in gold and brown could still be read: across the top of the wall and in a scroll “Steam Bathing” and under that the words “Good for Gentlemen,” and then another slogan, “Steam Cleans and Cures.” On either side of the door was painted the greater-than-life-size figure of a naked man, one view seen from the front, the other from the rear, both flexing their arms and both losing the deep red flesh of their paint to the sun and weather of harsh seasons.

Banks smiled once when he walked naked from the dressing room into the steam. He was immediately hot, wet in an instant, and felt his way through the whiteness that was solid and rolling and solid again all at once. Now and then four or five square feet would clear completely, and in one of these sudden evaporations he saw Cowles standing quite still and stretching, while the jockey was taking blind tentative steps, covering his face and mouth with the fingers and thumbs. But he heard the hissing, the sightlessness returned; they were groping in the same direction. Then: “Here, Mr. Banks,” it was Cowles, obliterated but close to him in the steam, “lie here. There’s room for three of us right here.”

There were tables—three now pushed together—tables and shelves to lie upon, slippery and warm, and a collection of live red iron pipes upon which the Steam Baths operator and his two young boys threw buckets of icy water: and the steam smelled first of flame, cold
mountain streams, and of the bare feet and ankles of the man and boys at work. And then it smelled of wood, stone floors, of white lime sprinkled between the slats on the stone; and of the bathers then, the molecules of hair oil and sweat from the skin. He breathed—and tasted, smelled the vapors filling the lung, the eye, the ear. So many clouds of it, so thick that the tin-sheeted walls were gone and only a lower world of turning and crawling and groaning men remained.

The shelving, wide enough for a man, was built about the room in tiers that reached nearly to the ceiling, all this space cut by braces, planks, verticals. Between the tiers were the tables with hands, feet, at the edges. It was a crowded ventless chamber and filled with noise, a confused and fearful roaring. But these men were prone and here activity was nothing more than a turning over or a writhing. Every few minutes the smallest of the two boys would fling a pail of ice water not on the pipes but across the flesh of a prostrate bather and the man would scream: no place here for undervests or socks, tie clasp or an address written out on paper.

“… Lie next to me, Mr. Banks,” and Cowles helped him up to the boards while the jockey climbed as best he could. Then the three of them were stretched out together and he felt that he himself was smiling. There was slime on the wood and steam was dripping down the braces, down the legs of soaking pine. By habit he started on his back and kept his hands at his sides, restraining his hands even when he felt the eyelids turning soft and his lips loosening, taking the seepage in. He heard the
splashing of ice water but it was aisles away, and the steam was heaped up all about him, his lungs were hot. Then, later, he listened to Cowles succumbing, the flesh—a hand or foot—beating against the wood and growing still, the moans filled with resistance, helplessness, and finally relief as if confessing under the blows of a truncheon.

“… Makes you feel … like … you’ll never walk again … eh, Mr. Banks?” Now a whisper only and the head buried down under the fatty arms, one huge leg fallen over the edge, never to be retrieved.

Banks rolled over, making the effort to throw off the pinion and move despite the nervelessness of muscles, despite paralysis. “Excuse me, Needles,” he said, but the jockey had his own discomfort and did not reply.

He always saved the stomach. It was best on the stomach and he waited until just that moment before he might not be able to roll at all, then tried it, and the exertion, the slickness of wood passing beneath his skin, the trembling of the propped arm—when these were gone there came the pleasure of shoulders sagging, of being face down in the Baths. Now he opened his eyes a little and his lips parted around the tongue. He thought of water to drink. Or lemonade. Or gin. He knew the torpor now, the thirst, with all the fluids of his body come to the surface and the hair sticking closely to his skull.

And then—not able to raise his head, drifting back from numbness and feeling the rivulets sliding down his flesh—he heard the sounds, the voices, that had no business in the Baths: not the steam’s hissing nor the groans
of bathers, but the swift hard sounds of voices just off the street.

“… Gander at that far comer, if you please, Sparrow. And you, Thick, shadow the walls.”

Moments later, back through the oppression: “Go down on your knees if you have to, Sparrow. …”

And the steam lay on the body of Jimmy Needles, and Cowles looked dead away. He thought he saw shadows through the puffs and billowing of the whiteness and he longed more than anything for a towel, a scrap of cloth to clutch to himself, to wipe against his eyes. In the anonymity of the Baths, amidst all those naked and asleep, he heard again the sounds and now he tried to rouse the trainer: “Cowles,” whispering, “Come awake now, Cowles.”

But then there was the ice blow of the water, and he heard the grunt of the child and pail’s ring even before the sharp splash covered him from head to foot. He froze that moment and the skin of his shoulders, legs, back and buttocks pained with the weight of the cold more shocking than a flame. When he bolted upright, finished wiping the water from his eyes, he found that Cowles was gone and in a glance saw nothing of Needles except a small hand losing hold of the flat boards as the jockey shimmied down and away.

So he followed and several times called out: “Cowles, Cowles!” But he got no answer. He crouched and crept down the length of one wall, made his way in blindness and with the floor slats cutting into his feet. He moved
toward the center and was guided by the edges of the tables.

And then there were three separate holes in the steam clouds and in one he saw the stooping figure of the man with the beret; in another he saw Thick scratching his chin; and in the last, the nearest, the broad tall body of Larry fully dressed, and his dark-blue suit was a mass of porous serge wrinkled and wet as a blotter. The cloth hung down with steam. The shirt, at collar, cuffs, and across the chest, was transparent as a woman’s damp chemise and the chest was steel. He carried a useless handkerchief and the red was quickly fading from his tie, dripping down over the silken steel. Thick was wearing a little black hat that dripped from the brim, and Sparrow’s battle trousers were heavy with the water of the Baths.

Banks squatted suddenly, then spoke: “What are you after now? Three beggars, isn’t it?”

Without answering or looking down at him the men began to fade. Not gone suddenly behind the vapor’s thick intrusion, but merely becoming pale, more pale as shred by shred the whiteness accumulated in the holes where they stood. A sleeve, a hand, the tall man’s torso, a pair of wet shoes—these disappeared until nothing was left of the trio which, out of sight, continued then the business of hunting despite the steam.

“Go on,” he heard himself saying, “go on, you bloody beggars. …”

Slowly he crawled under the braces of the table and
after them. The steam was heavy and his eyes began to smart. He tore his calf on a splinter. Once more, and for the last time in the Baths, he came upon the toe of Larry’s black boot, followed the trouser leg upwards to the lapel where a yellow flower was coming apart like tissue, saw the crumpled handkerchief thrust in his collar, the sheen of perspiration on the high cheeks, the drops of water collected around the eyes. But still there was the casual lean to the shoulders, one hand in one wet pocket as if he had nothing better to do than direct this stalking through a hundred and ten degrees and great dunes of steam. The boot moved, turned on the toe leather so that he saw the heel neatly strengthened by a bit of cobbler’s brass, and the man was gone again, saying: “… Found him, Thick? Have a go under the steam pipes then.”

And he himself was creeping off again, feeling his foot drag through a limpid pool, feeling the sediment on his skin. His hair was paste smeared across his scalp. He felt how naked he was, how helpless.

Then, still on all fours, he came to the comer. Under the wooden shelving, lying half-turned against a stretch of soapstone, bent nearly double at the angle of meeting walls, crowded into this position on the floor of the Baths was Cowles’ body with the throat cut. Banks crept up to him and stared and the trainer was a heap of glistening fat and on one puffy shoulder was a little black mole, growing still, Banks realized, though the man was dead. And though this Cowles—he had had his own kill once, kept dirty rooms in a tower in the college’s oldest quad,
had done for the proctor with a fire iron and then, at 4 A.M., still wearing the gown darned like worn-out socks, had stolen the shallow punt half-filled with the river’s waters and, crouched heavily in the stem with the black skirts collected in his lap, had poled off under the weeping willow trees and away, lonely, at rest, listening to the fiends sighing in nearby ponds and marshes—though this Cowles now lay dead himself his blood still ran, hot and swift and black. His throat was womanly white and fiercely slit and the blood poured out. It was coming down over the collar bone, and above the wound the face was drained and slick with its covering of steam. One hand clutched the belly as if they had attacked him there and not in the neck at all.

Just as Banks caught the lime rising at the odor of Cowles’ blood he felt flesh striking against his flesh, felt a little rush of air, and Jimmy Needles lunged at him in passing and fled, hunting for the door. Before he himself could move he heard a sound from the wood above Cowles’ corpse, glanced up, and peered for several moments into the congealed blue-tinted face of the constable: an old man’s naked face reflecting cow and countryside, pint-froth and thatch in all the hard flat places of its shape.

“Here now, what’s this deviltry. …”

But then Banks too was gone, no longer crawling but running, with the unhelmeted head of the constable and the sight of Cowles’ freshly cut throat before him, reaching the door as he heard the hiss and exhalation of new
blinding steam and the cry of the old nude member, only member, of the constabulary showered that moment from the small boy’s icy pail.

His hand slipped on the knob but it shut finally against the pushing of the steam, and the jockey handed him a towel. He covered himself, leaned back, stared at the bench upon which, shoulder to shoulder, were seated the three of them—Sparrow and Thick and Larry—with pools at their feet. Banks held the towel with both hands under the chin, looked at the dark men on the bench and the row of clothes hooks curling from the wall behind them. There was water about his own feet now.

“What did you kill him for?” Watching Larry in the middle but seeing the silks fluttering over the hump at the peak of the jockey’s spine: “Whatever for?” It was little more than a whisper above which he could hear the water falling from three pairs of hands, dropping from three sets of trouser cuffs. The flower had disappeared altogether from the blue lapel.

“Oh, come on,” said Sparrow, getting up, wringing the beret, “let’s have a dash to Spumoni’s!”

In the dusk surrounding the Baths the bees swarmed straight off the klaxon and made a golden thread from the bicycle to a nearby shrouded tree.