The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  He bent forward, took the cigar out of his mouth. The little trickles of sweat ran down his chest, gathered around his waist, ran down between his legs.

  "If they're famous they have to be in this book," Miss Bell said and laughed. "That is the definition of being famous . . . being in this book. If you aren't in the book you aren't famous."

  "Yeah, says who?" he said, but his voice faltered. He stared at the book in her hand.

  "It's just so, Mike," Miss Bell said and now she was speaking in the voice with which she talked in the classroom: even, confident, assured. "This is the book where they gather the names of famous men. They are experts at it."

  "O.K., O.K.," Mike said. He took the cigar out of his mouth, threw it toward the wastebasket in the corner. It fell in neatly and in a moment a tendril of blue smoke came straight up out of the wastebasket. Mike leaned back on the pillow and closed his eyes. "O.K. What does it say about John Cromwell?"

  He could hear her flick through the pages, run them through her smooth expert fingers with a hissing noise. Her fingernail scratched down a page. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

  "Here it is, John Cromwell," she said. "Read it." She laid the book on his chest. He opened his eyes and picked it up. Her finger was under a name. He read slowly.

  CROMWELL, John W., lawyer, b. San Francisco, 1895. Stanford University, Stanford Law School. m. Susan Donner; s. John Jr.; Timothy; d. Maria; Assemblyman, 1928-32 Sixth District; Congressman 1932-35, Ninth District; Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Kappa Alpha, Beta Sigma Chi, Bohemian Club, Pacific Union Club. Articles various law journals. "Torts and the Common Law," "Hobbes and Natural Law." 2323 Hyde St., San Francisco.

  "See?" Miss Bell said. "He went to college. Stanford."

  "Yeah," Mike said slowly. He ran his eye down the page, read other brief biographies.

  "Why did you pick him?" Miss Bell asked.

  "I heard him talk once in Exposition Park," Mike said. "God, could he talk. He was talking to a Mexican picnic. They were celebrating a revolution or something. Or the anniversary of a revolution. Something like that."

  "What did he talk about?"

  "I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Something about the glorious revolution." Mike slowly sat up in the bed. "But Jesus he had 'em. Really had 'em in his hand. I was standing in the crowd and they said he was the son of a real old rich California family. He looked crummy. His suit all covered with cigar ashes and he scratched all the time. It made them laugh. I even laughed. He was comical. He just stared out at the crowd and let them laugh. But when he talked. By God, they stopped laughing quick enough."

  "Don't say 'God' so often, Mike," Miss Bell whispered. "It's just a habit. Doesn't sound nice."

  "When he started to talk he was like a preacher," Mike went on. "Just like a preacher, except that he made you feel bad. As if you'd done something wrong. God, half those Mexicans were crying by the time he finished. I never forgot him."

  "Well, name anyone else, Mike, just anyone at all that is famous in his field. He'll be in this book and nine times out of ten he will have gone to college. You just can't get into an important job if you don't have a college degree. Name another person."

  "O.K., O.K.," Mike said. "That's enough. I'll go to college. I don't know how or on what, but I'll go."

  "You will?" she said uncertainly.

  She licked her lips and took off her glasses. Suddenly she looked disappointed, the sort of dull surprise of a person who pushes against a door he thought was locked and finds that it is open.

  "Where will you go?" she asked. "Stanford, U.S.C., California?"

  "Stanford," he said although he had never thought about it until a moment ago.

  "That's out of town. I'll miss you. You'll be gone for a long time."

  "Sure. I'll take Hank and go to Stanford."

  "Hank Moore?" she said. "I thought he didn't like you. You're always arguing. I don't think he likes you."

  "Doesn't like me?" Mike said. He leaned up on his elbow and stared at her. Then he laughed. "O.K., maybe he doesn't like me. But he'll go with me. We get along all right. Even if we're not best friends we got . . . we got respect for one another." Then, because his last words made him suddenly shy, his face went hard. "Don't worry about Hank. He'll go with me."

  Her eyes misted as she looked at him.

  "I'll miss you," she said. "You were my best student. I guess you're the best student Manual Arts High has had for a long time. Everybody says so."

  "Sure, everybody says so," Mike said ironically. "What do they know?"

  I ought to be good at Manual, he thought, there aren't many good ones there. That huge sprawling school was designed for the production of mechanics, printers, welders, typesetters, linotype operators, bookbinders, molders and auto repairmen. The same families that insisted that their sons take a training course for a trade also insisted that the school offer a college preparatory course. So there were always a few tiny classes which studied Greek, Latin, English composition, modern languages and the other college preparatory courses. Among this little group Mike was the undisputed leader.

  "Those lunkheads. What would they know?" he went on. "The competition isn't very tough at Manual," he said.

  "Will your folks be able to help you at Stanford?" Miss Bell asked.

  "Are you kidding?" Mike laugtled. "They don't have a penny. I've had to earn all my clothes money and spending money since I entered high school. You know that."

  "Look, Mike, I'll help," Miss Bell said. "I've still got some money left from what Father left when he . . . died." Her father had committed suicide the day after he sold the two Belgian hares to the poultry shop. "I'd be glad to do it."

  Mike watched her soft, nearsighted eyes search for his face, her lips twitching as she tried to read his expression. He smiled at her and her eyes widened and his smile was echoed in her face. No, Miss Bell, not this, he thought. For months I've taken hamburgers, malted milks, gabardine slacks, small change for rubbers, movie tickets, your car and books from you. But this is different.

  "No, I'll do it alone," Mike said.

  "Don't be silly," Miss Bell said. Her voice was a little desperate. "I'll make it as a loan."

  "It's not my conscience," Mike said. "I just don't want help from anyone."

  He sensed that this was the first loop in a snare. It came across the air of the hot room, rested about him with a thin delicacy that he knew could become a tough web of obligation as it was joined by dozens of other loops of the snare. Her smooth plump face worked as she tried to read the expression on his face; her lips smiled tentatively, then collapsed.

  "Please, Mike, I'd like to help," she said.

  Mike sat up, reached over to the table for a White Owl. He slid the cigar out of its cellophane wrapper, put the band around his little finger and lit the cigar. He opened one side of his mouth, let a thick white curl of smoke float up past his eyes. Miss Bell's eyes squinted as she tried to see through the smoke.

  For a moment he thought of asking her to come to Stanford; to teach up there. He could have the Buick, the hamburgers, the free food. And she would always be waiting, her lips ready to tremble, her hand ready to guide him to her body. Always ready. And then, for no reason that he knew, almost by instinct, he rejected it all; became protective.

  "No. I don't want your help or anyone's help," he said sharply. "First I'd take the money and then I'd take the Buick and pretty soon you'd want to move up to Stanford to be close to your investment and protect it. I don't want to be anyone's investment."

  Miss Bell felt the loop of the snare draw tight and snap. Her face grew hard, her eyes narrowed to hard black points, she sat up as if she were in front of her class.

  "God damn you, Mike," she said. "You owe me something. You can't talk to me like that. Sitting there naked and talking like that; it's just not right. Pull something over yourself," she finished with a shrill voice.

  "I don't owe you a god damn thing, Miss Bell," Mike said. "Not a god damn thin
g."

  Mike reached forward and pulled her gown down over her shoulders so that it fell down her arms and she was naked to the waist. She raised her arms once to cover her round full breasts and then, the hard look fading from her face, stared at Mike and in confusion at her breasts. She took her glasses off. She let her arms fall.

  "You don't even care," she whispered. "I've almost ruined myself over you and you don't care. If they ever hear about this at school I may lose my job and still you don't care. Not the least bit."

  "They know about it," Mike said. "But they won't fire you. They won't even mention it. They'll try to cover it up, ignore that it ever happened. You don't have to worry."

  Miss Bell seemed numb with despair or boredom or shock. She stared down at her breasts.

  He caressed her absently, for he was thinking of the family. He was thinking what they would say about his going to college. Especially what his father would say . . . his tather who had only three moods, none of which Mike had understood.

  In the first mood his father locked his legs around the polished wood of the cello and his stubby fingers suddenly became light on the bow. As the rich fat music flowed through the house his eyes became soft and remote and seemed not to see the dirty wood stove, the half-empty milk bottles on the sink, the grease-soaked papers containing chunks of food, the leanness of his children. Almost invariably it was Bach that he played, over and over, working with a ceaseless patience at revising the suites for the violin and cello. Occasionally he would stop, bend forward and with a tiny sharp knife scrape a note off the page and with a beautiful round hand draw in another.

  Always he would practice in the kitchen and then everyone must leave the room. Sometimes he would begin to practice late in the afternoon and continue until it was eight or nine and the four children and his wife sat on the back porch waiting for the notes to stop so they could eat supper.

  He had taken pupils, but none of them lasted long. The operator of the ice plant down the street sent his daughter and Mike's father had given her three lessons. She had grasped the bow in her fat fingers and sawed resolutely at the strings, her frightened eyes following Mike's father rather than the music.

  "Do you have no ear for the music? Are you not aware that you are breaking the notes?" his father would shout at the girl. "This is not chopping chips from a log, this is making music from a bow and gut strings. Try again, but for Christ's sake go easily."

  The girl's eyes would grow larger and her knuckles glowed red as she tightened her grasp on the bow and her knees locked tighter around the cello. During the third lesson he had grabbed the bow from her hands and began to talk to her in a low intense voice.

  "It is like two birds, my child. The bow is a bird and the cello is a bird. Bring them together softly, make the wings barely touch. Do it gently and the birds will make music for you. Forget the muscles of your anm and legs. Close your eyes and do it softly."

  The girl closed her eyes tightly and brought the bow down on the tight gut. The notes croaked leaden and broken from the polished brown wood of the cello. Her eyes popped open and she looked frantically up at her teacher. He leaned over, and taking the bow and cello from her turned away.

  "Go tell your father you cannot play the cello. Tell him you have no ear for music, your fingers are stiff and clumsy and you have an empty head and he has scared you too much at home," he said without looking at the girl.

  When the girl left he flexed his fingers for several minutes and then bending over the cello played for six hours while his family stood on the back porch listening to the rich fat music that flowed underneath and through the door.

  In his second mood Mike's father was apoplectic and red-faced over the table, pounding savagely with his fist as he told of the iniquities of the capitalists and the cunning evil atrocities of the monopolies. As the dishes chattered on the table he thundered the sins of America's wealthy few. Each of the laws to protect property seemed to be a goad in his flesh. In this mood, the children who could crept quietly from the room, but those under his eye sat silently with their shoulders hunched over, their eyes big in their heads and nodding dumbly like a claque of infants. His father would stand in front of the tiny row of children flourishing a newspaper, waving the crinkled paper in his hand.

  "Look, here it says that income taxes are to be reduced. See, here it says it. Read," and he would shove the paper under the eyes of the children who looked with glazed, frightened faces at the maze of type. "The income taxes for the rich are to be reduced and all the time people starve in the streets. The filthy sniveling bastards, the vultures. Every ounce of fat on their bodies is a pound d flesh from our bodies."

  His voice raged and was heavy with a vitriolic hate. The little claque nodded pointlessly and his voice went higher and more bitter. Occasionally his wife would interrupt.

  "Not in front of the children, John," her flat voice said. "They're too young, they don't understand."

  "No. Not in front of the children," he roared. "They don't understand hunger or cold? They don't know what it is to belch cold potato soup for thirty days in a row? Do you think they can't see their toes sticking from their shoes?"

  "But they don't understand," her flat voice went on. "It's too much for children to know." She would bend her head over into her hands and begin to sob, a sound as flat and dull as her voice. Even now Mike could not remember his mother; she was a gray formless shadow, her personality so thinly drawn beside the titanic rages and great hates of her husband that she almost vanished. "They can't learn too young. When children are undernourished in their mother's womb they know these things by intuition," the father said, but now his voice was lower and his face was suddenly tired. They know these things as intuitively as I know my music." He turned and looked at the children and their heads bobbed knowingly at him and then bent back down to inspect their knobby knees, afraid to look at his face. He wadded the paper in his hands, dropped it to the floor and as he walked toward the door he became smaller, more crushed, seemingly almost to shrink in size as he walked. The sudden deflation of pressure, the crumbling of their father would bring tears to the children's eyes and they would sit in the little row, their shoulders shaking delicately, making flat small sounds to match their mother.

  In the third mood, the best one, Mike's father was tender and kind. He would take a child on each knee and gently talk to them of a world where there was no law and every man was every other man's brother. He talked softly of Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, kind and generous and loving every man in the world. He talked of St. Simon and of Eugene Debs, whose picture was cut from a newspaper and was growing yellow and dried out over the kitchen sink. He told them of Joe Hill and the Wobblies who went out against the guns and bayonets of a superior enemy because they wanted to see justice done to all people. To the children it was a lovely fairy story where huge men with beards and strong knotted muscles were infinitely kind to women and children. The children smiled at one another and boldly squeezed their father's arm and ran their fingers over the curly black hair on the back of his hands. He rocked back and forth, and when he had finished his airy tales he would begin to hum a strange exciting song to which they added their piping, small voices . . . "Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye workers of the world . . ."

  When the four children played by themselves, they fought to play Joe Hill. The winner would be chased by the other three who were "Salt Lake City Special Deputies," and Joe Hill would dodge around the house throwing imaginary balls of wet phosphorus into wheat fields, binding bundles of dynamite to railroad car wheels, throwing kerosene on cribs of corn. Finally the deputies would capture Joe Hill and would stand him against the house with a bandage over his eyes. As they crouched down with their sticks leveled to fire, Joe Hill would strip the bandage from his eyes and look straight at them. Then they would make popping noises with their tongues and Joe Hill would buckle against the side of the house and finally slide in a crumpled heap to the ground. Then they would start the
game over and someone else would be Joe Hill.

  Mike thought of a Christmas many years before. They had never had presents or a Christmas tree, for Father had stated that they were symbols of a corrupted ideal. Even when Father had a good job at the studios or the Hollywood Bowl or in a string quartet, they did not have presents, but spent Christmas Day behind the curtains of the home watching the other children in the neighborhood run their cheap, painted bicycles and toys up and down the sidewalk. This Christmas Mother had promised them a Christmas tree and presents and the children had carefully not mentioned this to their father.

  It was late Christmas Eve when Mike had been awakened by a sound like tiny crashing cymbals from the living room. He had walked quietly to the door and opened it the slightest crack to see into the room. The first thing he saw was a small Christmas tree upside down in the far corner of the room and around it in perfect little splashes of blue, red and green glass were the shattered Christmas tree ornaments. They lay beautiful and sparkling on the floor, each one smashed into a circle of fragments. The glass head of a reindeer was the only intact piece in the wreckage. Mike's father was standing in the middle of the room, his hand still in the air after throwing the Christmas tree against the wall. He was smiling, a thin, gray smile that had nothing of humor in it, but much of pleasure and self-righteousness.