Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’m very concerned about you, Eugene. You’re dying of thirst, Eugene. Come into the kitchen with me.”

  I push him through the door. He’s very excited. I’ve never seen him so excited. He talks at me over his shoulder, his mouth flooding, his teeth like the little stone pebbles at the bottom of a fishbowl. “He’s got this sport coat, with a patch over the heart. Like a king, Push. No kidding.”

  “Be careful of the carpet, Eugene.”

  I turn on the taps in the sink. I mix in hot water. “Use your tissues, Eugene. Wipe your chin.”

  He wipes himself and puts the Kleenex in his pocket. All of Eugene’s pockets bulge. He looks, with his bulging pockets, like a clumsy smuggler.

  “Wipe, Eugene. Swallow, you’re drowning.”

  “He’s got this funny accent—you could die.” Excited, he tamps at his mouth like a diner, a tubercular.

  “Drink some water, Eugene.”

  “No, Push. I’m not thirsty—really.”

  “Don’t be foolish, kid. That’s because your mouth’s so wet. Inside where it counts you’re drying up. It stands to reason. Drink some water.”

  “He has this crazy haircut.”

  “Drink,” I command. I shake him. “Drink!”

  “Push, I’ve got no glass. Give me a glass at least.”

  “I can’t do that, Eugene. You’ve got a terrible sickness. How could I let you use our drinking glasses? Lean under the tap and open your mouth.”

  He knows he’ll have to do it, that I won’t listen to him until he does. He bends into the sink.

  “Push, it’s hot,” he complains. The water splashes into his nose, it gets on his glasses and for a moment his eyes are magnified, enormous. He pulls away and scrapes his forehead on the faucet.

  “Eugene, you touched it. Watch out, please. You’re too close to the tap. Lean your head deeper into the sink.”

  “It’s hot, Push.”

  “Warm water evaporates better. With your affliction you’ve got to evaporate fluids before they get into your glands.”

  He feeds again from the tap.

  “Do you think that’s enough?” I ask after a while.

  “I do, Push, I really do,” he says. He is breathless.

  “Eugene,” I say seriously, “I think you’d better get yourself a canteen.”

  “A canteen, Push?”

  “That’s right. Then you’ll always have water when you need it. Get one of those Boy Scout models. The two-quart kind with a canvas strap.”

  “But you hate the Boy Scouts, Push.”

  “They make very good canteens, Eugene. And wear it! I never want to see you without it. Buy it today.”

  “All right, Push.”

  “Promise!”

  “All right, Push.”

  “Say it out.”

  He made the formal promise that I like to hear.

  “Well, then,” I said, “let’s go see this new kid of yours.”

  He took me to the schoolyard. “Wait,” he said, “you’ll see.” He skipped ahead.

  “Eugene,” I said, calling him back. “Let’s understand something. No matter what this new kid is like, nothing changes as far as you and I are concerned.”

  “Aw, Push,” he said.

  “Nothing, Eugene. I mean it. You don’t get out from under me.”

  “Sure, Push, I know that.”

  There were some kids in the far corner of the yard, sitting on the ground, leaning up against the wire fence. Bats and gloves and balls lay scattered around them. (It was where they told dirty jokes. Sometimes I’d come by during the little kids’ recess and tell them all about what their daddies do to their mommies.)

  “There. See? Do you see him?” Eugene, despite himself, seemed hoarse.

  “Be quiet,” I said, checking him, freezing as a hunter might. I stared.

  He was a prince, I tell you.

  He was tall, tall, even sitting down. His long legs comfortable in expensive wool, the trousers of a boy who had been on ships, jets; who owned a horse, perhaps; who knew Latin—what didn’t he know?—somebody made up, like a kid in a play with a beautiful mother and a handsome father; who took his breakfast from a sideboard, and picked, even at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his mail from a silver plate. He would have hobbies—stamps, stars, things lovely dead. He wore a sport coat, brown as wood, thick as heavy bark. The buttons were leather buds. His shoes seemed carved from horses’ saddles, gunstocks. His clothes had once grown in nature. What it must feel like inside those clothes, I thought.

  I looked at his face, his clear skin, and guessed at the bones, white as beached wood. His eyes had skies in them. His yellow hair swirled on his head like a crayoned sun.

  “Look, look at him,” Eugene said. “The sissy. Get him, Push.”

  He was talking to them and I moved closer to hear his voice. It was clear, beautiful, but faintly foreign—like herb-seasoned meat.

  When he saw me he paused, smiling. He waved. The others didn’t look at me.

  “Hello there,” he called. “Come over if you’d like. I’ve been telling the boys about tigers.”

  “Tigers,” I said.

  “Give him the ‘match burn twice,’ Push,” Eugene whispered.

  “Tigers, is it?” I said. “What do you know about tigers?” My voice was high.

  “The ‘match burn twice,’ Push.”

  “Not so much as a Master Tugjah. I was telling the boys. In India there are men of high caste—Tugjahs, they’re called. I was apprenticed to one once in the Southern Plains and might perhaps have earned my mastership, but the Red Chinese attacked the northern frontier and…well, let’s just say I had to leave. At any rate, these Tugjahs are as intimate with the tiger as you are with dogs. I don’t mean they keep them as pets. The relationship goes deeper. Your dog is a service animal, as is your elephant.”

  “Did you ever see a match burn twice?” I asked suddenly.

  “Why no, can you do that? Is it a special match you use?”

  “No,” Eugene said, “it’s an ordinary match. He uses an ordinary match.”

  “Can you do it with one of mine, do you think?”

  He took a matchbook from his pocket and handed it to me. The cover was exactly the material of his jacket, and in the center was a patch with a coat-of-arms identical to the one he wore over his heart.

  I held the matchbook for a moment and then gave it back to him. “I don’t feel like it,” I said.

  “Then some other time, perhaps,” he said.

  Eugene whispered to me. “His accent, Push, his funny accent.”

  “Some other time, perhaps,” I said. I am a good mimic. I can duplicate a particular kid’s lisp, his stutter, a thickness in his throat. There were two or three here whom I had brought close to tears by holding up my mirror to their voices. I can parody their limps, their waddles, their girlish runs, their clumsy jumps. I can throw as they throw, catch as they catch. I looked around. “Some other time, perhaps,” I said again. No one would look at me.

  “I’m so sorry,” the new one said, “we don’t know each other’s names. You are?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “You are?”

  He seemed puzzled. Then he looked sad, disappointed. No one said anything.

  “It don’t sound the same,” Eugene whispered.

  It was true. I sounded nothing like him. I could imitate only defects, only flaws.

  A kid giggled.

  “Shh,” the prince said. He put one finger to his lips.

  “Look at that,” Eugene said under his breath. “He’s a sissy.”

  He had begun to talk to them again. I squatted, a few feet away. I ran gravel through my loose fists, one bowl in an hourglass feeding another.

  He spoke of jungles, of deserts. He told of ancient trade routes traveled by strange beasts. He described lost cities and a lake deeper than the deepest level of the sea. There was a story about a boy who had been captured by bandits. A woman in the story—it wasn’t clear whet
her she was the boy’s mother—had been tortured. His eyes clouded for a moment when he came to this part and he had to pause before continuing. Then he told how the boy escaped—it was cleverly done—and found help, mountain tribesmen riding elephants. The elephants charged the cave in which the mo—the woman—was still a prisoner. It might have collapsed and killed her, but one old bull rushed in and, shielding her with his body, took the weight of the crashing rocks. Your elephant is a service animal.

  I let a piece of gravel rest on my thumb and flicked it in a high arc above his head. Some of the others who had seen me stared, but the boy kept on talking. Gradually I reduced the range, allowing the chunks of gravel to come closer to his head.

  “You see?” Eugene said quietly. “He’s afraid. He pretends not to notice.”

  The arcs continued to diminish. The gravel went faster, straighter. No one was listening to him now, but he kept talking.

  “—of magic,” he said, “what occidentals call ‘a witch doctor.’ There are spices that induce these effects. The Bogdovii was actually able to stimulate the growth of rocks with the powder. The Dutch traders were ready to go to war for the formula. Well, you can see what it could mean for the Low Countries. Without accessible quarries they’ve never been able to construct a permanent system of dikes. But with the Bogdovii’s powder “—he reached out and casually caught the speeding chip as if it had been a ping-pong ball—“they could turn a grain of sand into a pebble, use the pebbles to grow stones, the stones to grow rocks. This little piece of gravel, for example, could be changed into a mountain.” He dipped his thumb into his palm as I had and balanced the gravel on his nail. He flicked it; it rose from his nail like a missile and climbed an impossible arc. It disappeared. “The Bogdovii never revealed how it was done.”

  I stood up. Eugene tried to follow me.

  “Listen,” he said, “you’ll get him.”

  “Swallow,” I told him. “Swallow, you pig!”

  I have lived my life in pursuit of the vulnerable: Push the chink seeker, wheeler dealer in the flawed cement of the personality, a collapse maker. But what isn’t vulnerable, who isn’t? There is that which is unspeakable, so I speak it, that which is unthinkable, which I think. Me and the devil, we do God’s dirty work, after all.

  I went home after I left him. I turned once at the gate, and the boys were around him still. The useless Eugene had moved closer. He made room for him against the fence.

  I ran into Frank the fat boy. He made a move to cross the street, but I had seen him and he went through a clumsy retractive motion. I could tell he thought I would get him for that, but I moved by, indifferent to a grossness in which I had once delighted. As I passed he seemed puzzled, a little hurt, a little—this was astonishing—guilty. Sure guilty. Why not guilty? The forgiven tire of their exemption. Nothing could ever be forgiven, and I forgave nothing. I held them to the mark. Who else cared about the fatties, about the dummies and slobs and clowns, about the gimps and squares and oafs and fools, the kids with a mouthful of mush, all those shut-ins of the mind and heart, all those losers? Frank the fat boy knew, and passed me shyly. His wide, fat body, stiffened, forced jokishly martial when he saw me, had already become flaccid as he moved by, had already made one more forgiven surrender. Who cared?

  The streets were full of failure. Let them. Let them be. There was a paragon, a paragon loose. What could he be doing here, why had he come, what did he want? It was impossible that this hero from India and everywhere had made his home here; that he lived, as Frank the fat boy did, as Eugene did, as I did, in an apartment; that he shared our lives.

  In the afternoon I looked for Eugene. He was in the park, in a tree. There was a book in his lap. He leaned against the thick trunk.

  “Eugene,” I called up to him.

  “Push, they’re closed. It’s Sunday, Push. The stores are closed. I looked for the canteen. The stores are closed.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who, Push? What do you want, Push?”

  “Him. Your pal. The prince. Where? Tell me, Eugene, or I’ll shake you out of that tree. I’ll burn you down. I swear it. Where is he?”

  “No, Push. I was wrong about that guy. He’s nice. He’s really nice. Push, he told me about a doctor who could help me. Leave him alone, Push.”

  “Where, Eugene? Where? I count to three.”

  Eugene shrugged and came down the tree.

  I found the name Eugene gave me—funny, foreign—over the bell in the outer hall. The buzzer sounded and I pushed open the door. I stood inside and looked up the carpeted stairs, the angled banisters.

  “What is it?” She sounded old, worried.

  “The new kid,” I called, “the new kid.”

  “It’s for you,” I heard her say.

  “Yes?” His voice, the one I couldn’t mimic. I mounted the first stair. I leaned back against the wall and looked up through the high, boxy banister poles. It was like standing inside a pipe organ.

  “Yes?”

  From where I stood at the bottom of the stairs I could see only a boot. He was wearing boots.

  “Yes? What is it, please?”

  “You,” I roared. “Glass of fashion, mold of form, it’s me! It’s Push the bully!”

  I heard his soft, rapid footsteps coming down the stairs—a springy, spongy urgency. He jingled, the bastard. He had coins—I could see them: rough, golden, imperfectly round; raised, massively gowned goddesses, their heads fingered smooth, their arms gone—and keys to strange boxes, thick doors. I saw his boots. I backed away.

  “I brought you down,” I said.

  “Be quiet, please. There’s a woman who’s ill. A boy who must study. There’s a man with bad bones. An old man needs sleep.”

  “He’ll get it,” I said.

  “We’ll go outside,” he said.

  “No. Do you live here? What do you do? Will you be in our school? Were you telling the truth?”

  “Shh. Please. You’re very excited.”

  “Tell me your name,” I said. It could be my campaign, I thought. His name. Scratched in new sidewalk, chalked onto walls, written on papers dropped in the street. To leave it behind like so many clues, to give him a fame, to take it away, to slash and cross out, to erase and to smear—my kid’s witchcraft. “Tell me your name.”

  “It’s John,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “It’s John.”

  “John what? Come on now. I’m Push the bully.”

  “John Williams,” he said.

  “John Williams? John Williams? Only that? Only John Williams?”

  He smiled.

  “Who’s that on the bell? The name on the box?”

  “She needs me,” he said.

  “Cut it out.”

  “I help her,” he said.

  “You stop that.”

  “There’s a man that’s in pain. A woman who’s old. A husband that’s worried. A wife that despairs.”

  “You’re the bully,” I said. “Your John Williams is a service animal,” I yelled in the hall.

  He turned and began to climb the stairs. His calves bloomed in their leather sheathing.

  “Lover,” I whispered to him.

  He turned to me at the landing. He shook his head sadly.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “We’ll see what we’ll see,” he said.

  That night I painted his name on the side of the gymnasium in enormous letters. In the morning it was still there, but it wasn’t what I meant. There was nothing incantatory in the huge letters, no scream, no curse. I had never traveled with a gang, there had been no togetherness in my tearing, but this thing on the wall seemed the act of vandals, the low production of ruffians. When you looked at it you were surprised they had gotten the spelling right.

  Astonishingly, it was allowed to remain. And each day there was something more celebrational in the giant name, something of increased hospitality, lavish welcome. John Williams might have been a football hero,
or someone back from the kidnapers. Finally I had to take it off myself.

  Something had changed.

  Eugene was not wearing his canteen. Boys didn’t break off their conversations when I came up to them. One afternoon a girl winked at me. (Push has never picked on girls. Their submissiveness is part of their nature. They are ornamental. Don’t get me wrong, please. There is a way in which they function as part of the landscape, like flowers at a funeral. They have a strange cheerfulness. They are the organizers of pep rallies and dances. They put out the Year Book. They are born Gray Ladies. I can’t bully them.)

  John Williams was in the school, but except for brief glimpses in the hall I never saw him. Teachers would repeat the things he had said in their other classes. They read from his papers. In the gym the coach described plays he had made, set shots he had taken. Everyone talked about him, and girls made a reference to him a sort of love signal. If it was suggested that he had smiled at one of them, the girl referred to would blush or, what was worse, look aloofly mysterious. (Then I could have punished her, then I could.) Gradually his name began to appear on all their notebooks, in the margins of their texts. (It annoyed me to remember what I had done on the wall.) The big canvas books, with their careful, elaborate J’s and W’s, took on the appearance of ancient, illuminated fables. It was the unconscious embroidery of love, hope’s bright doodle. Even the administration was aware of him. In Assembly the principal announced that John Williams had broken all existing records in the school’s charity drives. She had never seen good citizenship like his before, she said.

  It’s one thing to live with a bully, another to live with a hero.

  Everyone’s hatred I understand, no one’s love; everyone’s grievance, no one’s content.

  I saw Mimmer. Mimmer should have graduated years ago. I saw Mimmer the dummy.

  “Mimmer,” I said, “you’re in his class.”

  “He’s very smart.”

  “Yes, but is it fair? You work harder. I’ve seen you study. You spend hours. Nothing comes. He was born knowing. You could have used just a little of what he’s got so much of. It’s not fair.”

  “He’s very clever. It’s wonderful,” Mimmer says.

  Slud is crippled. He wears a shoe with a built-up heel to balance himself.