by Marge Piercy
“Very few things I want. Most of them I can’t have. Not ever.” His brows were yanked together, his pale eyes fixed on nowhere. “What you don’t see is I care a lot about her.”
She looked at him blankly. “Vera?”
“No! Caroline!” He rasped. “I have to find out what’s happening. I have to know. It sticks in my throat. It gnaws on me. She’s dying step by step and nobody cares. Nobody sees her but me—and she can’t see me.”
Her stomach dropped like a fallen cake. He was in love with Caroline. Seemed like everybody was.
“I had her, and I screwed up. The way I screw up everything.” He slammed his fist on the table. “Everything. I can’t deal with people, can’t deal with things. That I get anything done, that I feed myself and get through a day and maybe make a short film once in a while is a miracle.”
“How did you happen to break with her then?”
“Joye was pregnant. Finally she really was.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “It’s taken me a long time to undo the damage I did then. I got excited, I got desperate. I wanted them both to keep their heads and they both panicked. Joye wouldn’t even talk rationally.”
What the hell did he expect her to do?
“But by not asking anything of Caroline, just being here, always being here so she knows she can come for help when she needs it … I’ve got to play it cool. Then she got this idea to go traipsing around Europe, running away from herself, from me. Comes back with that rock. What do you do with a person who says she’s in love with somebody else? Even if you know it’s a lie.”
“But do you think she loved you?”
“She’s not capable of love. But I’m the chance she has.”
“Why?”
Again he struck his fist on the table. “It’s a thing I saw—something I knew from the first time with her. Only I couldn’t believe it then. Not being with her is hell. Who can tell what it’s like at night when I’m alone. I hit the walls. I have to scrape myself off the ceiling. I think I’m losing my mind. She turns everything on me, and I can’t con myself with anything less.”
When he talked about Caroline she had the feeling he was reciting an incantation, a formula. She believed and disbelieved.
“So I had a month, one month, between her sashaying back in here with that sparkler and the time her beloved gets here. And Rowley has to fuck up. He just has to.”
By midnight Anna was exhausted, while Leon’s voice had lost its sullen thunder. He was finally cheerful and had her make cocoa. Her chest felt hollow, her head ached. Why should she mind if he loved Caroline? They decided she was to spend the night on the couch. Obviously he liked that. As he said, he hated to be alone.
As she was making up the couch he said offhand, “Don’t know why you live in that rathole. They won’t even tell you when it’ll come down around your ears.”
“It’s cheap.” The curse had left. She liked her rooms again.
“You ought to move in here—plenty of room for two, three.… Save yourself money and be comfortable, ha ha.”
“And fight like caged cats, ha ha.” She sat on the couch and kicked off her shoes. “You’re genuinely domestic, but I’m not.” He was out of his mind to imagine she would live with him in bloodless brotherhood!
“No? Who asked you to clean this barn?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Evidently.” Leon grinned.
For the first time she felt a polarization of the air, a sexual question between them. I wonder, she thought, I wonder how real that obsession with Caroline is.
Leon
November
He kept noticing the building as he came from Woody’s bar or her apartment, not because they were tearing it down but because they had stopped. A foot of snow fell on the weekend. The next day the air softened, the sun poured down melting snow that froze that night in a jagged crust. His car was soldered to its parking place. All week in the brittle cold, the wolf wind sinking its teeth in his neck, he kept passing the building.
The doors had been ripped off and stood as a fence. The windows were broken, the roof kicked in. Part of the facade had been knocked away. The apartment—built on rough gray stone the color of Chicago—stood against the night sky half buried in its own rubble and ominously dark. Buildings are hardly ever that dark. Moon froze on its streaked walls in ghostly almostpinks and almostyellows. In the wind a forgotten chandelier tilted and swung.
From looking at that building every time he came past, he noticed a light in the redbrick tenement next door that he had thought empty. A glimmer showed at one second-floor window. A wavering light like a flame.
In Woody’s he found out that an old woman clung there barnacle-like, alone. He saw her a greatgrandmother, outliving children, forgotten by her descendants. In the daytime she crouched at a window with its cracks stuffed with rags, looking out at the busy street. People said she had lived there thirty years. People said she was crazy. She beamed at the Saturday street of shopping carts and dragged babies and drunks and linked couples. The electricity, the gas, the heat had been cut off. The city had delivered written warning the water would go next. They had given her every chance, they said. Now when he walked by he watched for her lamp.
He came past one morning in blurred dawn and saw that they had begun wrecking the gray apartment again. The crane reared above the shattered torso, ready to strike. In the halflight he saw the rats come out in lines, in slow deliberate rows, then the stragglers alone and hurrying after: he saw the migration of the rats from basement crannies and wall bowers of the broken building. They did not go into the old woman’s tenement next door. They poured in orderly measured haste toward the houses in the street behind, the townhouses with their shoveled walks and snowcapped hedges. He stood with his worn tweed overcoat pulled up around his ears and watched. In ten minutes they were gone. A case of relocation in superior housing.
Rowley
Saturday, October 25
He woke feeling great. The night before he’d been drinking, but he had burned it up. The bedroom faced the next house across two feet of hard earth, but lying in its gloom he felt sure the day was good. Harlan’s boy was whamming a ball thump off the steps. In the next room Yente was chasing something.
Last night he’d barely made it from the studio in time to take over from the second singer at a hoot. He had done his show live because of turning up another Black Jack record. He swung out of bed, sat scratching his toes. The song seeped through:
For each time I make it it’s seven times I lose,
Yeah for each time winning it’s seven times I lose,
That’s how come I got the California Boulevard Blues.
House of detention. Jack Custis’ rawhide voice working it over, voice from the late thirties with the flab and lilt scoured from it, a black singer who sounded as if the grit of a dirty world had honed him mean and powerful.
He stumbled on the first record by accident in a secondhand store, in a pile that looked like nothing but Guy Lombardo. Opened his September twelfth show with it. One side was a battered verson of “Jail-House Blues,” the other “Why Don’t You Get Out Of Here and Get Me Some Money, Too.” Sung by a man that was audacity. Turned the song on its noggin. He quit scratching. Imagine Annie not digging it. She had lit into him for something he’d sung and nothing about his find. He shrugged and got up as a crash came from the livingroom.
He sauntered over to pluck Yente from the door where the cat was cliffhanging. From his leaping point, the top of the bookcase, books had cascaded. Near the ceiling a fat horsefly buzzed. Rowley reached up, held off a minute, grabbed. Bringing his hand slowly down with the fly knocking against the palm, he released the fly in Yente’s face, laughing as the cat spilled forward.
Then the second disc with two original blues. In the meantime a listener wrote that Black Jack had been in Chicago during World War II and performed around bars on the South Side. So he told his listeners and urged that any tapes or records
be dug up. If Jack himself were alive he should get in touch and the same with anyone who knew him. Just after he went off a woman phoned. She said her son had called her in the middle of the first song, he had FM and he was a student at Roosevelt. That was surely Jack Custis, but he hadn’t sung she thought in a long long time. Yes, he’d been in Chicago, got a janitor’s job, but right after VJ day they fired him and she lost track. However, his sister Lucille had married a man named Thomson in the post office. Lucille had three sons, but she helped Jack after he got turned out of his job. She told him the church Lucille had belonged to and where she’d lived.
The day was bright and clear with a long clean wind off the lake. He carried his typewriter out and answered his mail sitting on Harlan’s steps—the straight flight leading to almost secondfloor level was a local style dating from the era when Chicago was filling itself out of the mud and nobody knew what height the sidewalks would be. Yente thrashed around in the cottonwood leaves on the lawn. Touch football in the street. In a backyard little kids were playing some counting game, shrill, rhythmic.
He stopped upstairs on his way out, tried to get Harlan to come with him. Harlan at the dinette table with documents on federal urban renewal laws a foot deep around him. “No I’m not going to go playing hide-and-seek with some rickety old race hustler all around the South Side. I got twenty phonecalls to make. And I thought you were going to help me put up posters?”
He had lunch at his favorite rib place full of the spicy smoke and ate an order with hot sauce standing. Then he drove west. Everybody was out riding around and it took forever to get by South Park and 47th, with cars making turns from the wrong lane and Bobbie Blue Bland drawing a crowd at the Regal. He did not think he would find Jack Custis today or next week, but he was sure he would find him.
He’d never taken himself seriously as a performer. He played for the pleasure and the cash. The women sometimes. He had good presence and rapport with an audience, but he liked best playing backup for somebody first rate. He wanted to play behind Jack Custis.
If only Harlan had come, that would heighten the game as well as increase the chances for success. They would be kidding and hustling each other. They didn’t get that much time together any more.
He found the big yellow apartment house the woman had described though it was on the corner of 43rd and not 41st. No Thomson. No Thompson, Tomson or Tompson. He rang the super, which did nothing. Finally stumbled on him at the back basement entrance.
The super was not a heavy man yet he looked flabby. Gray had worked into the brown of his skin and his hair was grizzled, but he had all his teeth and he locked his jaws together. No. He didn’t know nothing. No, no Mrs. Thompson, Thomson or otherwise lived there or ever had. He had been super more years than he could remember. No, nobody else would know. His eyes narrowed, his jaw set and he said No, No, No. Rowley tried to explain. Hatred flashed off the super like the blinding beam of a lighthouse.
He drove back slowly. He still had a lead: the Baptist church Lucille had belonged to, but next time he would try to go through helpful channels. He stopped to comb new releases at a shop that carried a lot of rhythm and blues and stopped again to pick up posters Harlan had ordered.
“You can’t just go around putting those posters on people’s property!” Shirley said. Her smooth brow puckered. Shirley was a thin bigboned woman with honey skin and a high rounded coiffure worn just to her nape. She was a fierce housekeeper and an earnest mother and without trusting Rowley admired him—he could never figure why since she disliked music with more thrust or grit than Mantovani. Harlan’s previous girls had been ones to make men’s heads turn in a bar rather than to warm a teacher’s heart at the PTA. But he had to admit the kids were great. Harlan spent a lot of time playing with them, going over homework or teaching them to make things (often with a how-to book in hand, since his own childhood had been anything but what he was providing).
When neither of them answered Shirley folded her arms and said not loud but passionately, “Harlan, you can’t go around plastering those things all over people’s property. You’ll get in trouble, and you’re bound to upset people.”
“If this neighborhood doesn’t wake up they’re none of them going to have any property to worry about,” Harlan said. “Come on, Rowley.”
The job made them silly. They got very quick. They hit trees and buildings as they went at finally about two minutes a poster.
“‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold!’” Harlan declaimed, looking back at the street. “You think anybody’s going to pay attention? Think anybody’s going to come Tuesday night?”
“Why not?” He said back:
When you hear this wolf howling, howling at every woman I see,
When you hear this wolf howling, howling at every woman I see,
Yeah, I’m only howling, well, well for what belong to me …
I learned that off a Champion Jack Dupree record.”
“Why you might’ve been a good blues man if you had a little of the blood. And a voice.”
“Guess who I got a date playing backup for?”
“What you get paid for that?”
“Standard union rate. I’d do it for nothing. He’s good.”
Harlan stepped back to admire, saw that the poster was crooked, shrugged. “They wouldn’t let you do it for nothing.”
“I’m crying.… Remember Jack Winder?”
“Small guy, played lousy jazz guitar.”
“I ran into Jack the other day in the Loop. Will that hold?”
“Half of them be ripped down before tonight. What’s become of the old fire-eater?”
“Working for his uncle. Office job. Married. Couple kids.”
Harlan grinned. “Baby, don’t say that like a fatal disease. Some of us like that, some of us think that’s living.”
“Remember when the FBI pressured his girl into giving them lists of everybody came and went in his pad?—and he was a mixer, he gave big parties. When she confessed, lot of people got a bad chill. Everybody was scared in those days.”
Harlan made a sour face. “We were all against the reds but we’d never for sure seen one—like the tales uncles tell you about timber wolves when you know there are things on two legs in the city much scarier. When I was fifteen I felt obliged to cut anybody who looked at me too long, and I guess I was meaner than any ordinary gray wolf.”
Rowley thrust out his finger. “Just observing. The older you get, the tougher you were. By the time you’re fifty with your first granddaughter and a beer belly down to your knees, you’ll be claiming you were a numbers runner at age ten.”
“Beer belly, ha. Speak for yourself, baby.” Harlan poked Rowley in the midriff. “I was a mean kid, but I loved my mother.” Nailing up the last poster he made a sign of the cross.
“Oh why don’t you work
Like other men do?
How in hell can I work
When there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah! I’m a bum
Hallelujah! Bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a handout
To revive us again!”
Rowley was waiting for a can of chili to heat while he wrote his reviews for the local folksheet. He had an open box of hard catfood and everytime he finished a sentence he reached in and tossed a little rabbit turd for Yente to chase and crack between his teeth. If he took too long on a sentence Yente would come and nudge his foot.
He got the cat last winter. He was cutting through an alley taking a shortcut to Annie’s when he saw something move in a garbage can outside the barred back door of a store. He was startled to come on a rat in daylight. Then some sudden curiosity made him question that faint noise. Cautiously he lifted the lid. Among the spoiled celery and moldy copper green oranges three kittens were bedded, tiny and wet and dabbled with the harsh green ooze of rotting spinach. He thought they were dead. Gingerly he touched them and immediately one began mewing, butting his hand for milk, while another stirred. Th
e third was cold. In high anger he began kicking on the door, found it open and charged into the stockroom of a grocery.
“Get those dirty things out of here,” the manager said when contact was made. “I don’t know nothing about them. What are you doing snooping in garbagecans? I’ll call the cops.”
He ended up carrying the two live kittens to Anna’s. He was disgusted to find himself involved in warming milk and shopping for pablum. One kitten died that evening, but the one who had butted his hand thrived. Then Anna’s landlady announced she did not allow pets.
“What do I want with a cat?” he asked her. “Isn’t there some agency you call and they come and get them?”
“And gas them. You shouldn’t pick things out of garbage cans if you mean to throw them back!” Her fine, dark, dogmatic air. He took Yente home.
He sang at Yente,
“Oh Dunderbeck, oh Dunderbeck
how could you be so mean
to ever have invented
the sausage meat machine?
Now all the rats and pussycats
will never more be seen.
They’ll all be ground to sausage meat
in Dunderbeck’s machine.”
Herb from the station was throwing a party and later he might drop by. He was learning a blues off the newfound Black Jack record, and he looked forward to sitting down after supper to work it through.
“She gave the crank
a hell of a yank,
and Dunderbeck was meat!”
Someone knocked.
“Evening, honey.” Caroline was carrying a bag. He had carefully said nothing about tonight. That ended the chili because she unpacked steak, beer, and frozen frenchfries.
“Another Care package. Do I look starved?”
She tittered happily. Coming up behind she put her warm arms around his neck. “Don’t you like me to make supper for you? You just won’t admit it.”
She made him feel brutish, forever shaking free and growling at the hundred and two gifts she tried to dump on his head. If he sat still she would tie bows all over him. “Look, I did my own shopping. You don’t have to haul in supplies like this was Hudson Bay.”
