The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  The words from the loudspeaker came distinctly into the restaurant, and were made round and distinct; as if the square were a sounding board.

  "Mike, he's insulting them," Connie said. "I've never heard anyone insult a crowd like that. They hate him. You can see it in their faces."

  Mike waved his hand at Connie to be quiet. Without looking away from Cromwell he answered her.

  "Wait until he finishes before you make up your mind," Mike said. "All the regular politicians never try to offend anyone, but Cromwell always starts out by insulting the audience. I can't figure it out, but it works. Wait a while."

  "Friends, why are you so hopeless against these termites who infiltrate our government, against those small gnawing animals who chew away at our independence and freedom?" Cromwell said. "Why do you sit back and let clean Italian youths get killed with American steel in a war in which we are not involved? Because you are lazy. Because you are not interested. Because you are bored."

  Cromwell paused, took the package of Sen-Sen out of his vest pocket, popped a handful of the small black bits into his mouth. Over the loudspeakers came a moist sucking sound. Cromwell carefully put the package back in his pocket.

  "He's crude, Mike. Really crude," Connie said. "Just plain offensive."

  "Sure, sure," Mike said impatiently. "You're not telling me something I don't know. But maybe they like him that way."

  The woman in the front row had released her grip on her coat. She was wearing a dirty dress. Her thin breasts hung limply under the cloth, her nipples making two dents in the cloth. Her mouth opened and her small white teeth, separated by wide gaps, gleamed. She was mumbling and her lips moved as Cromwell talked.

  Cromwell's voice thundered over the square, broke and came echoing back. The sound came from all sides, harsh and critical, heavy with scorn.

  The sound battered the crowd together. Isolated, unneighborly, mostly strangers, they huddled together in their antagonism to Cromwell, pushed forward into a tight interlocked crescent around the Garibaldi statue. When Cromwell's finger jabbed at them the crowd flinched and then drew closer together.

  Once a person at the fringes of the crowd started to leave and even took a few steps away. Then as if caught between the fierce magnetisms of anger, curiosity and fear the person wavered; his face contorted and became indecisive. Then the sound drove him back into the crowd; he shoved fiercely in, fought to the warm huddled middle of the people.

  "Why do they stay and take it?" Mike asked in wonderment. "Why don't they go?"

  He looked at Connie, searching for the answer.

  Connie did not answer. She was crouched forward in her chair, her eyes glittering, utterly absorbed.

  "He's awful. He's really awful," she said and she was unaware that her face was taut with curiosity. Unconsciously she whispered. "Why don't we go?"

  "Friends, maybe you are right to be bored by all this," Cromwell said. "Right now we are going through an evil cycle of history. Behind our public leaders, the big politicians, a Satanic group of fanatics, the real leaders, are determined to see that the cycle runs its dire course. Things are going to be done that we know nothing of; we are going to be manipulated; we are going to be used. Things like the free gift of our destroyers to the British are going to be repeated and repeated. Some of them you will hear about; more of them you will not hear about. And you will not hear about them for a simple reason: it is dangerous to talk about them. They don't want them talked about. Why, in this audience tonight there are people noting down what I say and sending it along to the enemies of our people."

  The crowd shifted, nervously. The gaunt woman looked sharply over her shoulder, stared bitterly into the crowd.

  "That son of a bitch is a demagogue," Hank said. "He's a fraud. I'm leaving."

  "Go ahead, leave," Mike said.

  Hank got up and walked out of the restaurant. He turned down the side of the square and disappeared.

  The crowd mumbled in a broken collective voice. They crept closer to the statue of Garibaldi and a buzz of anger rose in the warm air. Cromwell stared out over their heads.

  "Maybe it's hopeless," he said and now his voice was weary. "Maybe we are opposed by forces too evil and too powerful. But we must still fight back. It is the job of Christian Americans to fight back. We must find our enemies, pick them up by the scruff of their neck and hold them up to public view; the way a housewife holds up a rat before she smashes it against a rock."

  Then, at that moment, the crowd changed. They had been united in their hatred of Cromwell. He had come as a stranger and frightened them. Agreement welled in their faces, rubbed out some of their dissimilarities, made them suddenly a wedgelike, solid community. Primitive and breathless they hung at the edge of violence, hating Cromwell.

  Then, at the sound of weariness in his voice, they changed. For a tiny, poised, balanced moment the whole square was silent. Then they changed. The hate was still there; palpable in the air, as solid as fog. But now, it was directed at Cromwell's enemies. As if the weariness in his voice had opened some gate in every person their hatred flowed in a different direction.

  The crowd knew it at once. They stared at one another dazedly, uncertain of the change. They took courage as they saw it in the faces of others. A growl came from the crowd; a growl that was protective of Cromwell; a sound that threatened his enemies.

  "Bene, bene," said a few voices and then the rest of them took it up. "Bene, bene."

  And yet, mixed in their anger, blended in their fury was a thin fundamental hesitation. For Cromwell had not yet forgiven everything. His bony finger was still accusing. There was still a distance between all of them and Cromwell. They did not separate. Instead they huddled closer.

  The children stood rigid in front of the crowd. They bent forward with excitement. Their lips moved as Cromwell talked. When he said "evil" they repeated the word in a quiet chorus; playing with it the way children will, extracting by repetition some secret knowledge from the word, teasing it into a new and deeper meaning. And they did the same with other words he used, knowing by some infantile instinct which words to take.

  The woman in the front row was now rigid with excitement. She waved her hand in the air and in one corner of her mouth saliva gathered, ran unnoticed down her chin and dropped to the ground in gobbets.

  Cromwell went on, his voice soaring powerfully out into the square. The voice was full and complete and heavy with assurance.

  He went on talking for twenty minutes. The executive committee which had been standing sullenly behind the platform melted into the crowd and began to shout "Bene, bene" with the others.

  Then, quite suddenly, Cromwell stopped. He was through and he stepped away from the platform. The crowd hesitated a moment and then applauded. The woman in the front row stood raptly, her head cocked sideways, staring after Cromwell. In each eye she had a tear. Her lower lip trembled and she looked at Cromwell with an expression that was a mixture of regret, anger and love.

  Then the crowd pressed up around Cromwell. He shook hands with everyone who wished to, but he did it in a cold, austere and formal manner.

  "Let's go," Mike said to Connie. "It's over."

  They stood up and walked out of the restaurant, moved around the edge of the crowd and then walked to Connie's car.

  CHAPTER 10

  On Muscatel and Nerve and Life and Death

  Connie and Mike drove back slowly. They drove past the bocci ball houses, the pizza restaurants, the clots of old Italian men standing on corners and all wearing fedoras, the salami factories, the sourdough bakeries. They stopped at a coffee shop and had a glass of hot chocolate with brandy foamed into it and they ate a plate of small bitter green olives. They got back in the car and drove around the foot of Telegraph Hill and along the Embarcadero. They drove past the empty piers, the big quiet warehouses and they stopped and watched as a knot of longshoremen worked one ship under floodlights.

  The booms swung back and forth, the winches clanked, an
d the thin cables whined up out of the hold with a clutch of cargo at the bitter end. The apparatus was black and spidery, and the men served it efficiently and quietly. Occasionally there was a flash of a cargo hook, a voice was raised, but most of the time it was utterly quiet and the men hardly spoke.

  High above the piers was the curve of the Bay Bridge. The automobile ramps sparkled with headlights. The cables hung tautly between the great cement piers. High above the bridge the red aircraft warning lights blinked on and off. A streetcar moved across the lower level and gave off a grinding, harsh, metallic noise.

  Connie walked to the edge of the pier and looked down at the water. Oil slicks smeared the water in great iridescent curls and loops. The water gave off a salty, oily smell as it swished among the pilings, moved by the passage of unseen ships.

  "Let's go," Mike said. "We have to be back by two o'clock or you'll get a lockout."

  As they walked back down the pier, one of the cranes swung a single case of scotch out of the hold. A checker carefully turned away; then, as deliberately as a person breaking an egg, the case dropped sharply on the pier. There was a tinkling sound as the bottles broke and then the case was lifted a few feet from the surface of the pier. A man shoved a big tub under the case and the whisky trickled into it. The checker turned around.

  "One case of scotch broken by a winch failure," he shouted and made a notation on his board.

  From the deck of the ship came a single laugh. When the trickle of scotch thinned out the winchman let the case smash once more on the dock, the remaining bottles were smashed and he raised the case over the tub again.

  "All right, let's go," Connie said. "But let's go someplace for a drink first. I don't want to go right back to Stanford."

  They got in the car and Mike headed back across Market.

  "Where do you want your drink?" he asked.

  "Anyplace," Connie said and hesitated. Then she went on. "Someplace where there are just men. Not a cute cocktail bar. Someplace that's real. You know what I mean."

  Mike turned up Mission Street. He stopped in front of a bar.

  The bar had once had an imitation log-cabin front, but now the brown exterior of the logs had fallen off in strips and a white, powdery composition spilled out onto the sidewalk. Above the door a neon light spelled out "Last Chance." Several men leaned against the imitation logs, watching a drunk try to get to his feet and applauded his attempts to stand up. He crawled around a splash of vomit, stared thoughtfully down at his hands and pushed almost to his feet and then collapsed sideways with a crumbling boneless motion.

  Mike and Connie walked inside. It was dark and Mike saw a row of men seated at the bar. They were drinking beer or tumbler glasses of wine. Three tables along the wall were empty. Mike and Connie sat at one of the tables. Mike walked over to the bar and ordered two beers.

  "I wanted a scotch and soda," Connie said when he brought it back.

  "Sure you did, but they don't have scotch in here. Bourbon maybe, but they don't sell a drink of bourbon a week across the bar. If these men drink bourbon they buy a half-pint bottle and drink it in the street to save money and then come in here and nurse along a beer or a glass of wine."

  "They don't look very violent," Connie said looking at the almost silent line of men at the bar.

  "They're happy enough," Mike said. "They just don't talk very much. Mostly they just sit."

  Two men at the end of the bar began to argue. One of the men raised his voice in a petulant whine.

  "It's alfalfa. I know it's alfalfa," he said. He swung his arm around to include the other men at the bar. "Isn't alfalfa the biggest cash crop in California? Isn't it?"

  "It's oranges," the other man said.

  The men at the bar ignored the argument, stared down at their glasses, looked into the dirty mirror behind the bar, stacked and restacked their change on the bar.

  "Everybody thinks it's oranges, but it's alfalfa. God damn, I know it's alfalfa. You're stupid, Sweeney. God damn you're stupid. Really stupid."

  Sweeney said something like "You can't say that to me," but it came out a squashed, mangled sentence. He pushed back his stool and hit the other man. The men at the bar swung around to watch, their faces coming to life.

  The fight was almost soundless. The two men staggered toward one another, barely able to keep their balance and as one man's hand hit the elbow or wrist of the other the man would stumble sideways, trying desperately for balance. Even when there was a solid blow it lit with a strange weakness as the other man's body curved away. Like a fantastical slow-motion ballet the two men pawed at one another in the half-light; stumbling and falling, sliding down the walls, colliding occasionally and then staggering back, their arms waving with a slow wildness. Sweeney backed off, carefully assumed a boxing stance. He jabbed the air with his left hand and with his right thumb brushed his nose and snorted through his nostrils. His face lost its boozy softness and became hard. He natrowed his eyes and began to shuffle toward the other man. The other man watched in fascination, his arms by his side, impressed by this new decisiveness. As Sweeney drew back his right arm to strike, the man fell sideways onto a chair, but Sweeney continued like a machine that once started could not alter its motion. There was nothing in front of Sweeney except the bare wall, but deliberately and with great force he hit it. Everyone in the room heard the crisp crackling sound as several bones in Sweeney's hand broke. Sweeney wheeled around, his face gone soft again and twisted by a sudden confusion. He closed in on the other man, but the decisiveness was gone.

  They slipped in puddles of beer and then recovering bumped aimlessly into one another, recoiled and assumed offensive boxing postures, but the opportunity was past. Enraged they stared across the room at one another and then came together, extravagantly weaving and feinting. The fight had no definite end. People stopped looking at it. It became shadowy and unreal and at some point it expired and the two drunks stood shoulder to shoulder breathing heavily, forgetful of what had started the fight.

  "Not too savage a fight, eh?" Mike asked.

  Connie giggled.

  "It was funny. Not like the fights you see in the movies. I expected to hear the crack of fist against jaw. This was just funny."

  A man sitting in the middle of the bar swung around and looked at Mike and Connie. He stood up and walked over. He walked steadily, but when he leaned over the table they could see that he was drunk.

  "College kids, eh?" he said. "Out slumming. Mind if I have a seat?"

  "No. Sit down," Mike said.

  The man's eyes had white triangles of sleep in each corner, his beard showed blue-black through his skin, his collar was brown with dirt. Like a thin yellow spiderweb, a pattern of old dried vomit was spread over the shoulder of his suit. The suit itself was expensive, but very dirty.

  "I'm a college man," he said. His voice was clear and he spoke slowly, bringing each word up deliberately from the well of his consciousness. "Dartmouth '32." He glanced shyly at them. "I know you don't believe me. What does it matter? I don't care if you believe me."

  Mike did not say anything so Connie said, "We believe you."

  The man ignored her and went on talking. He talked with determination, with his eyes fixed on the strings of bubbles that rose from Mike's glass of beer. His voice was friendly, but inflexible, as if he did not want to be interrupted.

  "You think it's smart to come down here and watch a bunch of broken-down bums paw one another. Sociology of the drunk, sociology of the whore, sociology of the misfit. You'll go back to that little cotton-batting world of yours and tell the other kids all about life on Skid Row. You've met 'em, or at least you've seen the backs of all those drunks. Oh, you'll be smart. But you miss the whole point of the thing." He lifted his eyes from the beer and looked at them. "The point is that you think these people are misfits. You think being a drunk or a whore or a drifter is eccentric. But let me tell you friends that it's the only sensible thing in a society as rotten as ours. When a society is as ba
d as our society is today, the only thing to do is to sit drunk all day at a bar and talk. Or become a whore if you are a woman." He waved in the direction of the bar. "Those men over there; they are the only people left who think with their hearts instead of their pocketbooks. These men are individuals, understand? They're not like the great big stupid mass that keeps electing a bastard like Roosevelt time after time." He paused and his face became angry, as if he had recalled something unpleasant. Then he brightened. "They come into a bar like this and order their beer and drink it and talk a little bit to the other drunks. Not trying to make friends, not trying to hustle business, not frantic. They're relaxed, seep They make sense too. Kind of a hazy, obscured sense, but more iense than anyone else."

  "Can you remember the good sense the next morning?" Mike asked.

  "No. Why should you have to? Look, boy, the truth is too delicate to last for long. By the next morning it's gone. That's the surest sign it was the truth. If you believe something is true and you write it in a book and it becomes a habit of the people you have all the evidence you need that it is not true or that it is unimportant. But at the bar, hunched over the stool, drinking three beers an hour day in and day out and eating a few hard-boiled eggs and maybe a hot dog, that is where you hear the truth." He hesitated a moment as if a new thought had occurred to him. "You know I've got a constitution like a horse," He pounded his chest. "Good lungs, good legs, good arms. I was a 220 man in college. Ran on the relay team that held the world's record for the half mile. And I'm as fit as when I ran in the '32 Olympics."