Jack looked at him. He tried to remember the mean, sullen, cruel Dale Phipps, tried to see him as a hero, and just couldn’t do it. They drank their beer quietly for a few minutes, watching a six-ball game.
“You know,” Mano said, “a lot of people got washed down the drain in the last ten years. It kind of makes you wonder.”
“Yeah? Who else?” Now Jack was interested; he wanted to hear about other people’s failures. Now he was glad he had run into Mano.
“Remember my buddy Case? Little Bobby Case? He’s in Alcatraz. Got strung out when he was about seventeen, hit the junk like it was going out of style, and they nailed him in Arizona, he did five there, and they nailed him again, running shit across the border, and he got another two, and then a bit at Lexington, and then finally Alcatraz, on a life term or somethin. I’m not sure what they got him for. We split a long time ago.”
“Who else?” Jack wanted to know. “Who else went down the tubes?”
“Well,” Mano grinned. “You.”
“You remember that colored kid, Billy Lancing? Went to that party up in the West Hills where I got busted?”
“Sure, I know Billy. I see him around once in a while, around the country. He’s a crossroader. I ain’t seen him in a few years, but he’s around. I think he lives up in Seattle now.”
“No. He’s dead. He died in Q.”
“No shit. You want another beer?”
“No.”
One of the punks came up to them, and said to Mano in a low voice, “Hey, man, can you lay fi bucks on me? I got a fish wants to spot me the five. What say?”
“Fuck you, honey,” Mano said cheerfully. “You couldn’t find your ass with both hands. Make it.”
“Cocksucker,” the punk muttered. He went back to the row of seats, but the one he had been occupying now had an old man in it. He snarled at the old man and went away. Mano laughed. “These fucking kids don’t know dick. Not a one of them has the talent Bobby Case had.”
Jack felt hot and flushed. He was angry that Mano hadn’t understood about Billy, although there was no reason he should have. But Jack was tired of him, depressed, unable to get drunk. He felt his already tight gut tighten even more at the thought that Sally had left him and taken little Billy.
“Well,” he said to Mano.
“Listen, I’m going to Hot Springs in a couple days. You want to make the trip?”
“Me? What for?” There was something in Mano’s eyes that Jack didn’t like, a kind of vagueness.
“I can always use some help. You look like you’re still as tough as ever. You know.”
“Bodyguard?”
“Sort of.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. What did you think?”
“What do you think?”
Mano’s mouth tightened in a smile with no humor in it. “When I want a punk, I’ll get somebody prettier than you, baby.”
“Okay. No, I don’t want to go to Hot Springs.”
Mano shrugged. “I just asked.”
“Nice seeing you again.”
In the end, Mano wandered off with his beer bottle, went up to the row of punks, and whispered to one of them. The punk got up and Mano sat down. Jack turned away. He felt terribly uncomfortable. He guzzled the last of his beer, hoping it would cool him off. He did not want to see Mano again. He did not want to see any of these people. He did not like the place at all. He did not know what the hell he had come in here looking for, anyway. Unless it was the ghost of Billy. And that was stupid. The ghost of Billy—even the ghost—would have better things to do than hang around a poolhall, even the poolhall he had been arrested in. This was Billy’s headquarters on that last desperate trip to California when his stake was gone and there didn’t happen to be any squares around who would play him and he had to go out writing bad checks to get eating money, and this was the place where the two big plainclothesmen came in and picked him up with everybody in the joint looking the other way and some of them sidling out the back door, while Billy looked up at the two hard bored faces and grinned and cracked a joke that nobody laughed at, and went out between the cops, telling the houseman to keep his stick for him, walking jauntily, with that nigger-strut cakewalk shuffle he affected to show he wasn’t pretending to be anything he wasn’t, down the stairs to his own death. Only he didn’t know he was going to die in San Quentin. And he probably wouldn’t have if Jack hadn’t come along. But I didn’t kill him, Jack thought furiously, he killed himself. But over me. He really did that.
Jack got up and went down the counter to the check-out stand. The small, balding man behind the counter eyed him blankly.
“Do you still have Billy Lancing’s cue?” The words came thickly up out of his throat.
“Private stick?” the man asked in a bored voice.
“He left it here four or five years ago. He ain’t been back.”
The man bent down and came up with a thick dusty ledger book, flipped it open, and began going down a list of names and numbers. Then, with his finger on a line in the book, he looked up and said, “Four eight five.”
“Is it here?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” the man said. “You could look in the tray.” He pointed to a high dark wood cabinet of trays. Jack went over, found the drawer, opened it, found the numbered slot. The cue was there, a Willie Hoppe Special. Jack lifted it out. It had a fine layer of dust on the exposed side. It was still a good cue.
“Is it yours?” came a voice from behind Jack. The man from the counter was there, to see that Jack didn’t steal anything.
“No. The guy it belongs to is dead. He died over two years ago.”
“Oh? Yeah?” The man did not seem to care. “But it’s not your stick.”
“No. I guess you ought to sell it.”
“How do we know the guy’s dead? People leave their sticks here a long time.”
“He’s dead. Take my word. I saw him die.” Jack stared hard at the man. “At least, I saw him knifed. He died in the hospital, later.”
“Put the stick back. I’ll have to ast Earl. Thanks.”
“I loved him,” Jack said to this complete stranger. “But, see, I never told him about it.”
The man made a face. “Oh, yeah. Well, well.” He waited for Jack to replace the cue in its slot, and then went back to his counter. Jack went down the front stairs to Market Street, the heaviness still in his chest.
So he had finally admitted it, in the only possible set of words he could use. Still, he did not feel any better. He had loved Billy and it hadn’t done any good. He loved Sally, he told her about it many times, but it didn’t do any good. He loved little Billy but it didn’t do any good. They were gone, and out of his stupid pride and cowardice he would not go looking for them. Suddenly he wanted to get into a fight. He was off parole, he could get into a fight if he wanted to. It would only mean a few days in jail at worst. It would feel good to bash somebody in the mouth. He made his way through the Market Street crowds, hoping somebody would look at him cross-eyed, or would push him. Any excuse. He walked past one of those hot dog and magazine stands, full of tough-looking punks and half-Mexicans, with greased hair and hip clothes. He caught the eye of one of them, a big one with thick stupid lips and acne scars on his cheeks. Jack grinned at the punk hopefully.
Very casually, the punk dropped his eyes; Jack waited, but when the punk looked up it was in another direction. It was useless. He did not even want to get into a fight. All he wanted now was another drink. He went on down the street and into a liquor store and bought three fifths of Jack Daniel’s. Very expensive, but only the best. He took a cab home.
He opened one of the bottles in the cab and took a long swallow.
“Don’t do that, buddy,” the driver said without turning around.
“I’m celebrating,” Jack said.
“Yeah? Well, not in my cab. What’s the big occasion?”
They can’t help talking, can they, Jack thought. They must get very lonely. He t
old the driver about the end of his parole. “My third anniversary on the street,” he added.
“Oh, yeah? What’d they get you for?”
“I cornholed a cabdriver and took his money.”
The driver pulled over to the curb fast and got out and pulled the back door open. “Out,” he said.
“Have a drink, honey,” Jack grinned.
“Aw, shit.”
“Come on, have a drink an take me home. I dint cornhole you, did I?”
The driver took a quick short drink and got back in. “You’re puttin me on,” he said.
“Fuck yes, I’m puttin you on. You dumb son of a bitch.”
“Leave me alone, will you? I’m takin you home. I know how you feel. Don’t take it out on me.”
“Who’ll I take it out on? How about the niggers? Can I take it out on them?”
The cabbie laughed bitterly. “Sure. They takin over. You know what we call Yellow Cab now? The Mau-Mau Taxi Compny. They hire all the niggers, you know.”
“Goddam niggers takin all the good jobs,” Jack said bitterly. “Runnin all the banks. Fuckum. Fuck you, too.”
The driver sighed.
When they got to his place, Jack got out and paid off the driver. “Hey, pal,” he said, “how’s about comin in and blowin me?”
The driver stared at him with hatred, and put the cab in gear.
“No,” Jack said. “I’ll give you fifty bucks.”
The driver averted his eyes; Jack could tell he was thinking it over; coming in, seeing the money, trying to get it, knowing Jack was putting him on, yet tempted anyway. Jack laughed at him. “You got your price, don’t you?” he said. The driver gritted his teeth and drove off. Jack giggled. He felt mysterious and disembodied. He knew he hadn’t really wanted a fight. The cabbie was just working. No reason to hit a working man. Just get inside, go to bed and have a nice long drink.
He woke up in the morning sick with a cold, hung over, and feverish. He threw up several times, and tried to drink some whiskey, threw up again, and went back to bed. He was sick for three days, his head swollen and soggy, his hands trembling. He stayed about half drunk most of the time, and if it did not help him get rid of the cold, it did make him more comfortable. He didn’t shave and didn’t eat, and the cold just went away of its own accord, leaving him empty, sober, and shaky. He went down to the store and got some food, and when he came back there was a postcard for him in the mailbox. It was a picture postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle, and on the other side was a note from Sally. She was visiting her mother and stepfather with the baby, and would be home on Friday, love. Jack hadn’t even known she had a mother and stepfather; if she had ever mentioned them, he had forgotten. He went to bed again after eating, and that night he was back at work.
Twenty-Five
But he could not go on allowing his emotions to rise and fall at Sally’s whim. Try as he would, he could not understand her, unless the obvious was true and she had simply grown tired of being married to him. Perhaps to her the marriage had been an experiment, and the experiment had failed. Perhaps all marriages had some of this quality, and if there wasn’t a binding force stronger than love—or was it only passion?—something like a religion, a code, a blind facing-away from the messy inconclusiveness of life, a marriage was doomed from the moment the man and woman regained their sight. He did not know. He wondered how many people stayed married out of spite or from fear of being alone. He wondered how many children were raised in homes without love, where the counterfeit was accepted as the coin, where the words were warm and the eyes and heart cold. He wondered why he and Sally had never become friends. That could have made all the difference.
Later, after it was all over and he had stopped struggling against the loss of his wife and son, and time had washed the bitterness from his blood, he would marvel at how long he had managed to stay innocent, dramatizing his adversity the way a kid does, as if to prove that it exists. By then the past would lie half-buried in his imagination and the future would stand before him as implacable, faceless, and beyond his power to control as it always had—but with the calming difference that now he knew it and accepted it. By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death.
By then he would realize that all the dramatic alternatives his pain brought to mind could not possibly satisfy him forever, but that they, too, were forms of his lifelong fistfight with an invisible enemy: to have killed her—he dreamed sweetly of this—would have satisfied his childhood urge to murder long after he stopped needing the urge as protection; to have walked, as he saw himself in horrible self-pity, out to the Golden Gate Bridge for the last long drop to eternity would have been only an act of revenge, hurting no one but himself. There were other alternatives, too, born out of a need to act, a need for drama. He could have become a professional thief, revenging himself on a society he no longer loved or hated. He could have gone for junk or alcohol as weapons against his pain; they worked for some men, but he knew they would not work for him. He could have left the city and chosen a square of dirt far away in the mountains of the West and become one of those sour, lonely farmers whose only friends are distant clouds and mountain rims—indeed, it was still an attractive dream, one he could not quite abandon. He could have gone to college and become sharp and gone into business and made ten million dollars and shown them all. He could have turned poet, living the quiet life, accepting in spiritual gain what he had lost in material failure.
Only once, in those months of self-sorrow and anguish, did he actually do anything. Caryl Chessman, twelve years a symbol of one man against the machine, lost his final appeal, and Jack joined, stiffly, self-consciously, a group of young men and women who marched across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the long freeway to San Quentin, and stood in all night vigil to protest the murder. In the long night he came to sense something of these young people: they were different from him; not just a younger generation, but different, harder, more sure of their rights and the rights of man. They were even a little frightening. In the morning, after Chessman was dead and they were walking back to the city, some teen-agers came along and jeered at them, called them filthy names and laughed at their passive expressionless refusal to be angered. Jack wanted to be like the others, untouched by the jeers, but he could not. One young punk stuck his acned face next to Jack’s and spit; without thinking, Jack hit him twice in a surge of delicious wrath, leaving him bleeding and unconscious for his friends to carry away. The other demonstrators looked at Jack without admiration and without sympathy, and for the rest of the march home no one spoke to him. He could not help agreeing with them. The only hope for the world, for Billy, was to rid the earth of fighters.
There were other, perhaps more rational, alternatives. He could have remarried. He came to see that marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly. He could have more children, and raise them into rational adults. It would be a risk, but it would be worth it. There could be love and dignity in that kind of life. But it was not so easy. He had no work, no profession, no obsession, and it would occur to Jack that a man without a craft might turn too much of his energies onto his family, and burden his children with too much love and too much care. It would be a crippling thing to do, as crippling as the orphanage had been. So marriage would remain an alternative, rather than becoming an ambition.
Gradually, through his books, his records, his long walks alone, the mere passage of time, he would begin to come to terms with his life as it was. He became an observer. He began to taste his food and to smell the air. He saw things and felt them. The earth became real, and at times he was capa
ble of sensing the pleasure of existence. Other times were not so good. There were evenings when he would drink too much and get to feeling sorry for himself, and at such times he was easy to provoke. Among the regulars of North Beach he became known as a likable but unpredictable character, and it amused him to see the wariness in their eyes.
His life was temporary. He continued to park cars for a living, and he stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants, but for the time being, that was enough. Not that he planned to spend the rest of his life this way. He did not plan anything.
When Sally got back from visiting her parents things were different. Often Jack came home from work to find the old Chinese baby-sitter there and Sally gone. She would come in late, often in the morning, and Jack would refuse to ask her where she had been. Often he heard the roar of a sports car outside just before he heard her key in the lock. When she came in she would be drunk as often as not, and sometimes very affectionate. But Jack would pretend to be asleep.
It could not go on like that. One morning when she came in particularly drunk, Jack heard her singing, and heard Billy cry out. He opened his eyes and turned on the overhead light. Sally had the baby in her arms and was dancing at the foot of the bed. The baby was crying angrily. Jack got up and took Billy away from her and put him back in his crib. Sally stood in the middle of the small room, rocking slightly, her face blank. Her lipstick was smeared and she looked just as she had the first time he had seen her. He wondered if his millionaire friend Myron Bronson had brought her home.
“Come out in the kitchen,” he told her. She followed him, humming to herself.
He made a pot of coffee, and when they had both drunk a cup, he said to her, “This has got to stop. I won’t ask you where you been or what you been doing, but this has got to stop. You can’t take care of Billy and stay out all night, too. Forget about me. Think about him.”
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