by James Jones
Dave grinned. “Pop?” Again he felt that pointless desire to laugh. “Has he changed his name yet?” he asked.
“Nope, not yet,” Dewey said. “It’s still Herschmidt. Old Man Herschmidt, that’s what everybody calls him.”
“I figured he hadn’t,” Dave said. “I bet that makes Frank happy,” he said.
“I bet it does,” Dewey said. “After he went to all that trouble to get it changed. Why the hell would anybody want to get his name changed? I might could see changing it to something different maybe. But to change it from Herschmidt to Hirsh!”
“He did that when Pop ran off,” Dave said. He grinned. “I guess he thought it sounded higher class. And you say this is where the old man hangs out, hunh?”
“Yeah. Whenever he can scrounge up the price of a beer,” Dewey said. “He’s on the old age pension now.”
What a family Dave thought, and I’m part of it.
“As a matter of fact,” ’Bama said from where he still stood motionless, “I think that’s him coming in the door right now.” He took his hands out of his pockets and turned and leaned on his arm over the booth back facing the room, impassive, at ease, and all ready to watch.
Oh no, Dave thought, Not now. Not right on top of all that other. All the old hate, and the child’s hurt inability to understand, that was all gone. But what a fitting climax to a lovely afternoon and he even had an audience.
He had not been watching, and his first inclination was to jerk his head around to look. But something in ’Bama’s voice stopped him, some deliberate understatement. Casually, after a moment, he turned his head toward the door, where the stooped stringy looking figure dressed in overalls, work shoes, high railroader’s cap and a red-blanket mackinaw was coming in out of the light. The others were looking, too.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard his first name,” Dewey said. “What is it?”
“Victor,” Dave said, watching his father. “But I don’t think I ever heard him called that,” he said. “Except maybe by the old lady when I was a kid.”
“I’d never heard it,” Dewey said. “I guess I told you they still weren’t speaking, didn’t I?”
‘Yeah,” Dave said, “But then that’s been goin on for twenty years or more. They weren’t speaking when I left here.”
His father stumped straight to the bar without looking around, took off the mackinaw, and sat down. He ordered a beer. Under the overall straps, he wore a light blue workman’s shirt, scrupulously clean. In fact, all his clothes were clean Dave noted with surprise, all except the weathered red mackinaw. They didn’t look like the clothes of a workingman. But then why should they? he thought, he’s been living on the pension almost ten years.
It was hard to believe, sitting here and looking at him (and aware of the others watching) that this old man was his father, his flesh-and-blood parent. They really had had so very little to do with each other, and Dave didn’t really feel anything about him, nothing at all. Nothing except that the thought of the word father, the abstraction, sent blood pounding against the backs of his eyeballs. Thinking about the old man coldly was one thing, but seeing him in front of you was another, not so objective.
Of course, part of the emotion was due to knowing these three men were sitting here watching him intently.
Actually, to all intents and purposes, he had never really had a father. From the time he was in the fifth grade, Brother Frank had been the only father he had had. But even before that he had known he hadn’t had one. A lot of times, he had surprised upon the face of the old man that look that he, the child, couldn’t make out but intuitively understood. Later on, he, the adult, had seen the same look on the faces of other men a great many more than our civic leaders are willing to admit, he thought, and remembering had been able to understand it. They these other men would sit and tell him all about their wonderful sons and daughters and display their photographs, and upon their faces would be the same look that once had been on the old man’s face, when he would sit around in the flimsy (but comfortable) workingman’s house in the evening after work and stare at his six offspring with a look of bewildered ire as if wondering where they had come from and what connection could they possibly have with such a simple thing as a Saturday night lay.
But at least, Dave thought, he didn’t pretend to love us with that mealy-mouthed virtue, or put on pompous airs about his family responsibility, or expect us to love him—all of which Brother Frank had immediately done when, hating them all for cramping him, he had been forced by their existence and by the circumstances of social approval to become the family’s sole caretaker.
From the corner of his eye, he became aware of Dewey Cole opening his mouth to say something further and he turned back to him.
“What I don’t see is why they never got a divorce,” Dewey said.
For a moment, Dave couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. He had to think back, way back, to what he himself had last said, before he realized that Dewey was only carrying on the conversation.
“Why?” he said. “They both seem to be satisfied as they are. Besides, the old lady don’t believe in it.”
“Hell, I thought that was only Catholics,” Dewey grinned. “That’s no kind of woman to be married to.”
“There used to be a lot more of them,” Dave said. “They were just products of their time. I think I’ll go over and say hello to the old son of a bitch,” he said with a grin, and got up, and walked over to the bar. He said the first thing that came into his head. “Hello. How’s the welding business?”
The old man at the bar, who resembled a caricature of his father, looked up at him piercingly. He is over seventy, Dave thought. He had been stocky once, but age had wizened him and made him look birdlike. The long scrawny neck and beak of a German nose and the unwinking eyes under the domed railroader’s cap all made him look like a topknotted kingfisher.
“I ain’t in it no more,” he said. “I’m retard.” If he recognized his youngest son, he hid it well. Even his bushy eyebrows looked feathery.
“Do you remember me?” Dave asked grinning, as if talking to a child. “You know who I am?”
“I remember ye,” his father said. “Well, whatta you want?”
“I just got in town. Thought I’d say hello.”
“All right, hello. If it’s money ye want, I ain’t got any. If you’re wantin me to change my name, I won’t do it. Now, what else do you want?”
“Nothing,” Dave said. “Not a thing. I don’t want anything, I just thought I’d buy you a beer.”
The old man jerked his head at the gray-headed bartender. “Tell him. He’s the one you’ll have to pay for it.”
“Bring Mr Herschmidt here another beer,” Dave said, “and put it on my check.”
“And ye can tell Frank I’m never goin to change it. lt’d give the son of a bitch too much pleasure. He-he.” Greedily he pulled at the beer he obviously had been nursing.
“All right, I’ll tell him,” Dave said. “I’m goin out to his house tonight.”
“You are, hunh? Then tell him for me that the next time he sends somebody around they should buy me a pint of whiskey instead of a beer and not make it so obvious.”
“Okay,” Dave said, “I’ll tell him.”
“Don’t baby me, you son of a bitch,” his father said. He was watching Dave in the mirror, grinning malevolently, like a predatory bird. “It won’t do you any damn good. Agnes already tried it.”
“Okay, Pop,” Dave said lightly. “Get him another beer when he wants it,” he said to the gray head, who was standing down the bar listening without interest. “And give him a fifth of whiskey.”
“Go to hell,” his father said. “You just tell Frankie what I said. He-he.” Frankie was a nickname Frank hated.
“I’ll tell him,” Dave grinned. His face was flushed. He turned away from the bar. “See you later.”
The old man took another long drink of his beer without looking around.
Dave sat down in the booth and grinning looked at the three men and shook his head ruefully. “What’re you gonna do?”
It was a reasonably good act. They all grinned back. There wasn’t really any malice in them. They had just wanted to watch.
“He’s a mean old bastard,” ’Bama said from where he leaned against the booth, as if voicing Dave’s thought. “Well, I got to go and make my rounds.” He straightened up and turned, and then stopped and put his hands in his pants pockets and stood motionless facing the window, like he had done before.
Up at the bar, Dave’s father was having the barman put six bottles of beer, instead of one, in the sack with his fifth of whiskey. Without paying, he clutched the sack and stumped to the door, looking neither right nor left.
’Bama pulled his hands out of his pockets and lit a cigarette, and then stepped over and held the door open for the old man with his sack. Old Man Herschmidt stumped on through, and ’Bama holding the door with one swayed-back buttock as if it were a usable appendage jerked his head at the bartender and made a motion as if writing on his cuff, then pointed his finger at himself. Then he turned out and was gone, up the street.
“He’s not paying for all that!” Dave protested.
“He’s done done it,” Hubie drawled.
“What’s he do for a living?” Dave asked, looking after him.
“He gambles,” Dewey grinned.
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough. If you gamble like he gambles,” Hubie said.
“He’s pretty good,” Dave said.
“Good enough to make a lot of money around here. When he works,” Dewey said. “But half of what he wins, he donates to the bookies in Terre Haute or Evansville or Indianapolis.”
“The rest he spends,” Hubie drawled.
“He’s a hell of a pool player,” Dewey said. “Makes a lot, that way. At’s where he’s goin now.”
“Has he got a name? I’ve never heard anybody call him anything but ’Bama,” Dave said.
Dewey grinned boyishly and his incredibly handsome blue eyes lit up with relish. “His name is William Howard Taft Dillert. He was born in 1912.”
“But you don’t never want to call him that,” Hubie grinned. “Specially Howard. That’s what his mother calls him.”
“See, they’re from down around Florence, Alabama,” Dewey grinned. “That’s why the nickname. His sister use to work in a plant in Birmingham and took the family there. Then she moved up here to Parkman to work for Sternutol Chemical and brought them here. Now the other brother works for Sternutol, too. ’Bama came along with him for a visit and just stayed.”
“They don’t much like it, either,” Hubie said. “That was ten years ago. I don’t bet there’s fifteen people in town knows what his real name is. Countin his family. Dewey just happen to go up the same day he did to register for the draft, is how he found out.”
“He hates that name like poison,” Dewey grinned.
“Dillert’s a good old Southern name,” Dave said.
“Yeah, but William Howard Taft isn’t,” Dewey said. “’Bama says his old lady sure would’ve done him a big favor if she’d only waited six months to have him.”
“Yeah, at least Woodrow Wilson was a good Democrat,” Hubie said.
Dave laughed. It was the first real laugh he’d had all day, and it was a short one. And immediately it had stopped he felt exhausted, depleted. He felt as though if it hadn’t stopped he might go on laughing and laughing until it turned into crying hysterics. The kind where you lie on the floor weeping and listening to yourself and wondering why. Thinking about it now, he felt it bubbling up in him, and he choked it off.
“Well, I’ve got to go,” he said. “Got to get cleaned up to go out to Frank’s tonight. You tell ’Bama thanks for all that beer and stuff.”
“We see you down at Smitty’s later,” Dewey said. He looked at his watch. “My girl’ll be gettin off at the brassiere factory before long. We’re gonna meet her here.” He grinned. “She gets two weeks’ pay today.”
“Yes,” Dave said, “sure.” He nodded and got up and went toward the door. He felt too full of beer, and he was hungry for food again already. But he couldn’t stay here and eat. He had to get out.
He went out and turned the other way from ’Bama, down the hill away from the square toward the hotel. It was still dribbling snow, and this surprised him.
He thought that had been a long time ago. Before all this life had started rushing back at him, from all sides, zeroing on him, like a man standing in the middle of a maze of railroad junctions, trains shooting at him from first this side and then that side, whistling past, and the blinding lights, and the smell of coal smoke and vitality.
Chapter 4
THE STREETS WERE almost deserted. Not busy at all.
It was strange he didn’t remember the day the old man left or the day he returned, but it didn’t work like that. It worked like this: One day they discovered he was missing, but they didn’t know how long because sometimes when he got drunk enough he just slept at the shop the welding shop, which was really a converted shack of a garage and they never bothered him there, though sometimes the fire went out on him, and he would almost freeze, but this was rare because it was rare for him to get drunk like that, but still it was enough for them not to realize he was missing, no farewell note, no good-byes, just suddenly began to realize he was missing; then they started living their lives without him being there; a long time later when they had about got used to it he suddenly reappeared they began to see him on a street or in a store silent irascible and morose finally they realized he was back to stay they never spoke to him and he never spoke to them.
Not for a long time anyway.
Of course, by then, they all knew the story. Their father had run off with the wife of the family doctor and a large part of the doctor’s savings. Five years later, Old Man Herschmidt came back. Minus the doctor’s wife, minus the doctor’s savings. He proceeded to settle down in Parkman again. He moved in on the other side of town and went back to his welding, and he and his lawful wife never spoke to each other again.
Up to then, they had been an ordinary family of an ordinary welder who did not get drunk over ordinarily much.
He remembered the night they finally realized he was missing. Frank called them all in while their mother remained alone in her bedroom, they sat down around the kitchen table, and Frank said we must never ever mention this to Mother again, we must never mention his name again, he is dead, he no longer exists by the Grace of God and our own ingenuity, we will make out, it will probably kill her, and that was when Francine said scornfully nuts! to both counts and Frank said all right it’s going to be embarrassing and who’s going to be making the money? It looks like I am, and you take it or leave it. Frank was then a senior in high school. So was Francine, since they were twins.
So they never mentioned it, or him, again even when he came back to town. It was as if he really did no longer exist even when they saw him on the street. It never seemed to bother him. Nothing did. He was already Old Man Herschmidt. The only time he was ever mentioned that he could remember was when he himself was packing up and preparing to leave and Frank said, Like father, like son! Frank was then already married and his wife pregnant, the daughter of the man who owned the cheap notion-semi-jewelry store he worked for which he later developed with his own blood into exclusiveness and was already having his own girlfriends on the side. Like father, like son! he told him with some little ruefulness and gave him the five dollars.
The girl herself was a nice enough girl. A country girl. Who had filled out at thirteen and been bewildered by it since she discovered (probably by accident) that she liked sex when she hadn’t ought to. The three of them, all seniors and all good buddies, had been serving her night after night, but her father decided on him because Frank owned a prosperous business, prosperous at least by the standards of New Lebanon, Dark Bend River farmers, which the other two seniors also were.
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He himself had lost his own virginity in the eighth grade. And wasn’t that about the time Frank had changed the family name?
The eighth grade was also the year that Francine, no longer able to suffer the continuing embarrassment that Frank had warned of, left town on her own and began putting herself through teacher’s college, wasn’t it?
God, how it jumbled and tumbled out no continuity. How long had it been since he’d thought about it? And only those three main threads to give it any semblance of reason at all!
The old man was back, of course, by the time he left and he had gone up to see him on his way out of town, but then he hadn’t had nerve enough to go in. So he stood outside and looked in through the grimy window at the alien figure in the dark-glassed mask holding the torch and went away without either speaking or the couple of bucks he might have been able to milk him for, not because he was afraid or hated to speak to him he had spoken to him many times since he got back, but because he was embarrassed to be leaving town in disgrace.
His mother had said with her laboriously acquired religious sorrow, only: You have sinned, son, sinned very bad, but God will forgive you if you ask him to write me often you’re my son.
Christ the things you think of.
A year with that carnival.
Another with circuses.
And no meaning anywhere.
Except to work up from hammerhead to peewee gandy dancer, assistant to a seller of cheap novelties. More money for more broads. He learned to short change fairly well. And, of course, he drew upon that material later for those short stories.
The meaning of meaning.
After that, he traveled the South with a magazine subscription gang, where his short-changing ability immediately endeared him to his boss. He quit after three weeks because he was no good, he could not convince himself that they ought to buy magazines and hence could not possibly convince them, but he would not confess this because he hated to admit to anyone, especially the boss, that he was an abysmal failure at so simple a thing in which the boss, an ignorant man who could not even read, succeeded so brilliantly.
