Portland had driven her crazy. Even at sixteen she hated it; she was the despair of her family, the only child; wild, already in trouble with the police once or twice before she met Harmon and on impulse ran off with him; she would sit in her room upstairs after her parents had sent her to bed and wait for them to go to sleep and then get dressed again and go out the window and catch a streetcar downtown; but when she came back she would come right in the front door, and if they were waiting up for her she would lose her temper and tell them to mind their own business, and if her father tried to slap her or spank her she would hit him and scream at him until he just stopped trying, and then she would go back upstairs and into her room and lock the door. She must have met Harmon on one of these expeditions downtown because one night she just didn’t come home.
Harmon’s face was ruined; he lost all the teeth on the left side, and there was a scar running from just under his left eye through his lip and down his chin; his face now had a caved-in look to it, and his blue eyes lost all their brightness, and he was just plain mean from then forward until he died; living the life of a good hardworking cowboy, maybe not the kind of life he might have dreamed about in Oakland, California, but, for him, good anyway: eighteen hours a day when the cattle were on the range, half the anger cooked out of him by the sun, the dust, the hot acid smell of his horse under him; the work, even in winter, the thousand irritating must-be-done tasks attendant to cattle, drawing his surplus energy out through his arms and legs until there was barely enough for one yelling Saturday night a month left in him, one night to drink and smash windows and batter any face that presented itself.
He used to write letters, and come to the post office every chance he got to see if there were any answers. It was not long before everyone knew what he wanted. He wrote the letters to orphanages and State homes all over Oregon, trying to find out if there were any children in them named Wilder or Levitt; but he would come out of the post office and sit down on the bench and open his mail and crumple the letters up after he read them, his face black with rage, and so everybody knew he hadn’t found the child yet. Maybe the urge to find the child got cooked or burned out of him too; after a while he gave up, and people stopped thinking about him because he did not come to town any more at all, but stayed out on the ranch. Cowboys move around a lot, changing jobs, but not Harmon. He stayed with Mel Weatherwax until he died. Mel said he was a good cowboy and did not talk much, and if you left him alone he caused no trouble. Whatever made him run away from Oakland to the Wild West seemed to have been taken care of, one way or another. Maybe what he wanted was freedom. Maybe he looked around and saw that everybody was imprisoned by Oakland, by their own small neighborhoods; everybody was breathing the same air, inheriting the same seats in school, taking the same stale jobs as their fathers and living in the same shabby stucco homes. Maybe it all looked to him like a prison or a trap, the way everybody expected him to do certain things because they had always been done a certain way, and they expected him to be good at doing these strange, meaningless, lonely things, and maybe he was afraid—of the buildings, the smoke, the stink of the bay, the gray look everybody had. Maybe he was afraid that he too would become one of these grown people whose faces were blank and lonely, and he too would have to satisfy himself with a house in the neighborhood and one of the girls from high school and a job at one or another factory and just sit there and die of it. So he ran for the only frontier he ever heard about and became a cowboy. But of course he brought it all with him when he ran, and it kept at him, jabbing, destroying, murdering, until he himself was all gone and nothing was left but a man’s body doing work. And finally that died too. It was an accident. A horse kicked him and he died the next day of a brain hemorrhage; he had been trying to knock loose the balled ice under the horse’s hooves, and he slipped and wrenched the horse’s leg and the horse kicked out and got him right on the temple, and that was the end of him. The accident happened in 1936, and he was twenty-six years old, almost twenty-seven. He never did get to see his son.
Neither did Annemarie. She had been living with the Indians for a long time now, and seemed all right, but when she heard about Harmon’s death, something went out of her—something the massed hatred of the white people of the town had failed to diminish in all that time—and a few weeks later she killed herself with a 10-gauge shotgun. She was twenty-four at the time. The Indians buried her.
PART ONE
The Juveniles
1947
One
There were worse things than being broke, but for the moment Jack Levitt could not think of any of them. He stood on Fourth Avenue in downtown Portland looking into the window of a novelty store, his hands in his pockets, his heavy shoulders sloped forward. Two items caught his eye, the first a not-very-convincing puddle of plastic vomit, colored a bilish yellow, with bits of food sticking up from the surface; the second a realistic heap of dogshit, probably made out of plaster of Paris and then colored brown. Somebody made these things to sell. Somewhere there was a factory in which workers stood at assembly lines and turned these items out, and the workers got paid for it. Jack wished he could think of something like that to make money with. But he knew he had neither the imagination nor the energy for inventive work. He smiled to himself. When you’re broke, all kinds of crazy ways of making money come into your head. Rolling drunks. Walking into a store (like this one, for example, empty except for an old man in the back reading a newspaper) and grabbing the guy by the shirtfront, giving him a couple of pops on the mouth, and emptying the cash register....Or he could go down to the labor employment place on Third, a few doors up from the burlesque theater, and try to get a job. Except that all along the Burnside skid row there were men standing out on the sidewalk or leaning against buildings, and there would be a whole cluster of them at the employment office, trying to get work. When Jack had first run to Portland a few months before, he had thought all these men were bums, but they weren’t. They were just workers out of work. Fishermen, dock workers, lumberjacks, fry cooks, men who had been to barber college, and only a few winos. Gypsies, too, whole families of them sitting out in front of their storefront homes, and Jack knew the gypsy girls, the pretty ones in their costumes, would smile and wink at you, and beckon you into their place, offering what no gypsy woman ever delivered, and then, once inside, asking for some money “to bless,” and gypsy men would begin to glide out of the curtained shadows.... The men were mostly used-car dealers, and would race around town in dusty old cars, stopping people and asking if they wanted immediate cash for their car, or offering to repair dented fenders. They would say that they would remove “that ugly dent” for three dollars, and if you went for it, five or six of them would pile out of the car with hammers and start banging away on your fender, and they would turn your one big dent into dozens of small dents, and then demand three dollars apiece, surrounding you and arguing furiously about the sacredness of a contract and they had witnesses; and if you absolutely balked and refused to pay anything at all, they would offer to buy the car. If you didn’t want to sell, they would eventually go away, but not without argument. Another great way to make money. Only, Jack was not a gypsy.
He was, in fact, a young man who had a hard time getting work. Not that he wanted to work, but he did want money, and right now, in daylight, that seemed the only way. He was seventeen, and very hard-looking. He had penetrating, flat, almost snakelike blue eyes which ordinary citizens found difficult to look into, and his head seemed too large for his body, accentuated by the mop of wild blond curls he seldom combed. He looked mean without looking angry, and his huge fists seemed capable of smashing skulls, almost as if they had been made just for that. Jack was not the picture of the model employee, and even when he smiled there was too much ferocity in his expression to relax anyone.
Yet he was only a boy, and most of the hardness was a mask, developed over the last dozen years of his life because he had discovered that nobody was going to protect him but himself.
On a smaller, thinner, less powerful-looking boy, his expression might have been mistaken for self-reliance, and commended.
He turned away from the window, taking his hands out of his pockets, and began to walk up the street. People who saw him coming got out of his way. It was a gray Portland day, and this helped him to feel sorry for himself. He was down to his last few dollars and locked out of his hotel room. He had quit his job and did not know where he could get some more money. He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense “wanted.” He did not feel “wanted”—he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to “How High the Moon” and “Artistry Jumps.” That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. That put limits on them. And he knew that every single one of his desires could be satisfied with money. So what he really wanted was lots of money. Say, ten thousand dollars.
He was really in a good humor when he got to the poolhall which was one of his three hangouts (the other two were a street corner and another poolhall), and he ran down the stairs cheerfully, and when he saw his friend Denny Mellon he called out, “Hey, daddy, have you got ten thousand dollars you can loan me?”
Denny frowned and said, “What do you need it for?”
“Houses and lots,” Jack chanted.
“Well, okay. I thought you was going to waste it on war bonds or somethin.”
A few minutes later Jack was involved in a game of tencent nine-ball, and he had forgotten all about his troubles.
Jack was not friendless. Shortly after coming to Portland he found the location of the local hard kids and joined them, and in the gang he had a certain status as one of those who would stop at nothing, one of the really tough boys, like Clancy Phipps and his brother Dale, a leader because (so it seemed to the rest of the boys and girls) there was no proposition too dangerous for him. In Portland the hard kids were called “the Broadway gang” and they hung out at the corner of Broadway and Yamhill. The gang started during World War II, and still goes on. These were the kids who were not liked or wanted enough at their high schools, or who despised school themselves, and who wanted the excitement Downtown promises; the ones who were in trouble with the schools, the police, their parents—nearly everybody—and so gathered together into one loosely knit gang. There were perhaps fifty of them, boys and girls both, and the makeup of the gang was in a constant state of flux; members would vanish into the Army or jobs, or get married, or make friends at their own schools, or go to the reformatory in Woodburn, or leave the state and go to New York or San Francisco; and new members kept coming along, many like Jack, to be recognized and admitted to the group on the criteria of toughness, a lack of conventional morals, a dislike of adults, and a hatred of the police.
Most of them were like Jack Levitt in that they wanted a lot of money and wanted to do anything they pleased, at least for a while; but most of them saw it differently: they wanted to enjoy themselves now, because they knew in their hearts that soon they would get jobs and get married and start having families (like their own), and the fun would be over. If they seemed too noisy, too wild, too defiant, perhaps it was a little out of desperation, because lying before them were endless years of dull existence, shabby jobs, unattractive mates, and brats with no more future than themselves. Jack did not see things this way, and there was no reason why he should have. He did not know who his parents were, and he did not expect the future to be a repetition of the past because that was unthinkable—he at least had a vision of the future which included a wildness in itself, a succession of graduated pleasures and loves and joys, and if it was going to be a struggle, that was all right, too; he knew how to fight for what he wanted. In fact, that was almost all he did know. There were buried terrors, too; but he hoped that part of his life was finished. In this sense, he was that odd combination, a cynical optimist. His hopes were vague and even childish, but they were at least hopes, and their vagueness was a blessing; for many of the others, the future was all too clear.
At about the same time Jack Levitt ran down the steps to the poolhall, another boy whose future was vague, yet to him full of promise, got off the bus from Seattle. His name was Billy Lancing and he was the last one off; a slender, bony-shouldered boy of sixteen, hawk-faced, with sharp, too-old, calculating eyes. The color of his skin was a malarial yellow, and it was obvious from that and from his kinky reddish-brown hair that he was a Negro. He wore a white windbreaker and carried a small blue canvas overnight bag, which he put into a ten-cent locker there in the Greyhound depot; then he walked downstairs to the men’s rest room, slipped a nickel into one of the pay-toilet slots, and entered. When he came out the locker key was inside his stocking, under his right instep. This was important: inside the bag, along with all his clothes, were fifteen ten-dollar bills, rolled tight and kept together by a doubled rubber band—his caseroll, money he had won and scrimped and saved to make his break from home.
The key safe, he went to one of the sinks and ran cold water over his hands, and then splashed it over his face. The men’s room was full of sailors, and their talk and laughter bounced strangely off the tiled walls, an insane barrage of fragmentary noises. Except for the echoing quality it sounded to Billy just like his home in Seattle, the continual clatter and chatter of the people who lived in their housing-project apartment: his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his old aunt from the South, his three grandparents; a home in which someone was always up, meals were always being prepared, somebody was always getting ready for work and someone else just home and having a drink of whiskey; the radio going, a child crying, another screaming with laughter; his aunt’s constant low bubbling voice from the corner beside the stove, talking about the times in the South and the cold and the rain; or his father and grand-father arguing Boeing this and Boeing that. When Billy thought of home he thought of noise, and now in the men’s room of the Greyhound depot in Portland, almost two hundred miles from the housing project, the old fear of suffocation, of being strangled by the noise, came over him again, and he felt his gut tighten and his palms go moist. I’m just scared of Portland, he thought. That’s all there is to it. Like any other kid. He went back up the stairs and out into the street.
Heavy gray bellies of clouds hung low over the buildings of downtown Portland, but it was not raining yet, and the side-walk was dry. Billy looked at the blue-and-white street sign: Fifth and Taylor. He knew from what they told him at the Two-Eleven in Seattle that there were three poolhalls in downtown Portland: the Rialto, on Park, between Morrison and Alder; Ben Fenne’s, on Sixth, between Washington and Stark; and a place everybody called “The Rathole,” on Washington between Fourth and Fifth. The top action was supposed to be at the Rialto, but Billy decided that he would like to try out the other places first. He walked over to a driver leaning against a Yellow Cab and asked him directions, and then began walking down the hill, toward Washington Street.
“The Rathole” was easy to find: a red neon sign, over an entryway between a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter and a real-estate office, saying “Pool-Snooker-Billiards” and a stairway down. As Billy started down, two businessmen were on the way up, laughing about something. One of them gave him an odd look and then turned sideways to let him pass. The stairs were incredibly dirty, and the concrete landing at
the bottom was stained and covered with litter, smelling of stale vomit and urine. There was a small green wine bottle lying on its side in one corner, and next to it a paper bag from which the neck of a second bottle stuck out. Billy turned right and pushed open the swinging doors and walked down three more steps into the pool-hall.
To his right, a glass cigar counter with a few stale-looking wrapped sandwiches on top, a horse-pinball with the usual player bent over it, a telephone booth, a man in a white shirt, probably the proprietor, leaning against the counter and giving advice to the pinball player; to his left, six tables in a row, all pool tables. Three of them had games going, and there was a row of theater seats against the wall, with clusters of idle watchers opposite the active tables. Beyond the cigar counter Billy saw an entryway leading to a back room, and through it he could see the corner of a snooker table, and past that, more theater seats. There was a lot of noise coming from the back room, and with his hands in the windbreaker pockets, Billy walked over and leaned against the entryway. There were three snooker tables, and all three had games going; businessmen with their coats off, probably playing four bits a corner while they ate their lunch, laughing, all friends, all playing together every day at noon. One of them, Billy saw, was a policeman, plump, loose-faced, chewing on a sandwich. Billy was just about to turn around and leave when he felt something on his shoulder.
Hard Rain Falling Page 2
