by Richard Ford
“I’ll go,” I said, whether a hure would be coming or not. I was surprised my mother had said I could go and trusted Niall to look after me. This was possibly another way growing up happened. You were unexpectedly freer. She, of course, would’ve known nothing about the hure.
“We’ll depart half seven,” Niall said and seemed keen about it. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a shove back—something he’d never done. “Tidy up a bit,” he said. “You’re headed for a hot date with old Niall tonight.” He had the big smile going.
“Is anyone else coming?” I looked down our street. One of the old ladies from the residences yet to be converted to a rooming house was outside in her pink housedress, sweeping chinaberries off her front walk. She stopped and frowned at Niall and me, then waved her broom brush in our direction, as if she was angry. I had no idea why. “You nasty boys. Shoo. Go away,” she shouted at us. “You don’t belong here. Shoo on. Shoo on.”
Niall sneered at her and gave her back the double thumbs-down. “Listen to her shite,” he said. “We’re rubbish. But we’ll show her she’s rubbish.”
I’d never seen Niall sneer before. It was strange to see his face turn to that so fast—as if he had it ready. Though I’d seen my mother sneer before—at my father—more than once.
“So. It’s put on your laughin’ boots, ole Harry,” Niall said, turning away and shoving into me again. He was starting back across the street to the DIAL house, where I’d never even been inside. He seemed suddenly to be in high spirits, as if what the old lady had said to us had made him happy.
AT SEVEN THIRTY NIALL WAS WAITING IN THE CAB, IN FRONT OF HIS house. It was almost dark. The little yellow roof light showed in the twilight. He was smoking. Lights were blazing in the DIAL house windows. Hillbilly music was being played on a radio, and I could see somebody—a woman—walk past a window without looking out. The air was warm and summery though it was late October.
“I’m pondering joining the U.S. Navy,” Niall said as soon as I got in, as if he’d been waiting to tell me.
“Why?” I said, though I knew it wasn’t the right question. But my father hadn’t served in the war due to his heart problem. I didn’t know why Niall should serve if he was Irish.
We were driving out through the old neighborhoods toward the north side and the outskirts where the 51-Holiday was.
“The old man conjectures if I join up, I’ll get handed a skilled trade, then they’ll make me a citizen same as you when I get out. There ain’t no war going on to get me blown to Jesus. The old da, of course, joined with the British forces—dead against his will. Awful business. I’m not on for that. I prefer an ocean cruise and hula girls.” Niall punched my knee and flashed his smile across the dark front seat. “How’s about you, young Harry? You go for hula girls? I bet you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“I guess you do.” Niall was still in high spirits and wanted me to be. My mother had said to me that afternoon, “Your friends are being kind to you because you lost your dad. I like him. Niall’s personable. You and he can have a fine time. Just try.”
“I will,” I said. And it was true. No one else had been kind to me. At school, they treated me like a sick person they didn’t like—when they weren’t ignoring me. I didn’t say this to my mother. It would only have discouraged her about her own life.
THE 51-HOLIDAY WAS OUT THE HIGHWAY WHERE THERE WERE JUST dark drive-in bars and falling-down shacks and jukes with cars crowded in on Friday night. A string of cars with headlights shining was extended back from the 51 ticket booth. The screen was already showing advertisements for businesses in town—a used-car dealer, a flooring company, a camera store, the hotel where my mother was working at that minute. Even a funeral home. There was still a crease of orange daylight in the low sky to the west, rendering the big square screen washed out and dimmer than it would be when it was full dark.
“We need to inch in as close to the front as we can,” Niall said, navigating us past the little wooden hut where a girl sold tickets out through a window.
“Two?” the girl said.
“Just the one,” Niall said brazenly. “The infant here’s not even fourteen.” I stared forward acknowledging nothing, as if I couldn’t hear well.
The girl peered in at me. “He don’t look that young.”
“How do I look to you?” Niall said, smiling.
“About half-smart,” the girl said. “Where’re you from, Louisiana?”
“There, see? There’s your answer,” Niall said, ignoring the question about where he was from and handing out a dollar bill. “You can’t tell just by lookin’. I’m Alfred Einstein.”
“Fooled me, Alfred,” the girl said, pushing red-paper tickets back through the opening. “You look pretty much like an idiot.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Niall said. “I’ll be ’round to your house tomorrow for my kiss.”
“I’ll be waitin’,” the girl said. “With my pistol.”
“They all love me,” Niall said, as we moved past into the big fenced enclosure, where other cars were finding places and getting situated, their headlights shining up at the screen and washing out the advertisements.
I admired the way Niall went about things—in a smooth way. Driving with his elbow out the window, using the steering wheel knob, his cigarette tilted out. I liked that he didn’t mind driving the taxi to the movie, and that he’d arranged it with my mother, and made an impression that might alter how she thought about me. I liked that I felt detached from my own difficulties—school, and my misery about my father and not knowing how to overcome all the bad feelings. Niall took life in his stride and seemed purposeful—whether it was being forced to leave home when he didn’t want to, or about encountering hures in the middle of the night, or lying his way into the drive-in. He had a natural understanding of whatever stood in front of him. It was a better way to approach the world than always having to be right and somebody be wrong—which was how my mother saw life and how I’d been raised to see it.
Niall drove us around to the far side of the movie lot, where there were fewer cars to block the view. I assumed he’d been here before. This would be a place someone would come to be with a girl in the dark. The old passion pit.
Niall maneuvered the cab close up beside a post where a metal speaker was attached by an electrical cord. He lowered his window and brought the speaker right inside with us and hung it on the window glass, then shut the engine off. “Perfect,” he said. “We’re grand. Get ready to laugh your arse off.” It was a word he used. It was Irish, I assumed.
But right away it was strange to be sitting side by side in a taxicab, the nose aimed at the giant screen eighty yards away, just as if we were driving down the highway. But it also was exciting. Life ahead was promising new things in rich supply. “When does it start?” I said.
“Comics go first,” Niall said, “then the eternal eejit Bob Hope comes on. ‘A whole ocean of laughs,’ the advert says. Paris is in for the setting. You’ll need to go there, yourself. Live it up.” He bopped me on the shoulder one more time. “I don’t suppose you’d want one of me ciggies? I find ’em calming.”
“No,” I said. Though I did want one. My mother had told me never to start. She smoked since my father had died, and our house smelled of it. She smoked in bed at night. I would only ever do it, I thought, if I was alone. I didn’t understand why Niall needed to be calm.
“How ’bout Monsignor Sneak E. Pete?” Niall said with his big grin still on. From under the seat he produced a brown-paper sack out of which a short bottle neck was exposed. He un-screwed the cap, took a swig, and expelled a gasp. “Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow” was the noise he made. And inside the car immediately smelled like my father’s breath when he and my mother had had their “cordials.” Which he called it, he said, because drinking them made my mother cordial—though it never lasted long. “Shall I tempt you?” Niall said. “Just to file down the edge.” He held the sack forward. And I too
k it. And even though my lips would be on the bottle where his had been, I did what I’d witnessed him do—took a drink, without knowing anything of what it contained or what would happen.
The liquor was very warm from being under the seat, and it instantly caused my throat to close, and my breathing almost to stop. I wanted to shout from the pain and also to gag and cough in one eruption. Only I couldn’t allow that in front of Niall. I’d be counted as a fool forever. Instead, I got still and did not breathe at all. I let what I’d drunk drain burning out of my chest and start burning in my stomach—which wasn’t as bad. My eyes were full of tears. My face was on fire. I didn’t know how I was going to make any of this stop.
“In the grip, are we?” Niall said, smiling in an appraising way, registering that I was unable to speak and possibly not move. “Take yourself a wee breathy,” he said. “You’re likely not dying. You didn’t need to gulp it. Leaving some for the room is customary. You’ve preserved your amateur standing. That’s assured.”
“What is it?” I croaked with the breath I was instructed to take.
“The queen’s reserve,” Niall said. “Pap keeps it in the hack, then forgets I’m susceptible. Possibly more so.”
My belly and throat all the way down were scorched. And though I didn’t feel tipsy—as my father had always said—I knew I’d shamed myself and assumed Niall thought belittling things about me.
“Give us wee bumpety,” Niall said and took the sack and turned up a second big swig, then screwed the cap back. He was constantly smiling, no matter what he thought. “You’re on brig rations now,” he said. “You need to learn the proper etiquette.” He forced the sack back under the seat.
I decided from the smell that what I’d drunk was gin—which was what my parents had drunk as their cordial. And I determined I’d never touch it again. I felt like my neck was swollen and my throat half its normal size, at the same time as my stomach felt emptied. My mother had made a pot roast for dinner, and I’d eaten a good bit. But I felt vacant down inside and had almost instantly developed a small, needling headache, which made me want to go home.
The drink had had an effect on Niall, as well. He’d suddenly lost his good humor and had pushed over against his car door, as if something he didn’t like had happened. I’d loused up the business of the liquor by being an amateur, which I supposed he hadn’t appreciated. Though I didn’t see what I could do.
The comic feature, when it started, was one I’d seen at the Prestige and didn’t think was funny. I tried to laugh, but Niall didn’t laugh at all. The Stooges were doctors wearing white coats and worked in a hospital and kept getting in everybody’s way and punching one another and falling down. “Would you look at ’em,” Niall said from against his door. “It’s pathetic. Get away. The ole man says they’re all midget cretins. It’s typical. Why do we watch ’em?”
When the Stooges were over there was an intermission, and everyone was invited on the screen to visit the refreshment stand. “Whadda yez want?” Niall said, not being at all friendly. He’d opened his door so the light went on. People from other cars were streaming toward the low concrete building in the middle of the big lot where there were lights on, and where the projector seemed to be located. “I told your mam I’d coddle you,” Niall said. “What does baby want?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Thank you.” Seated under the dim inside light, I felt a long way from anywhere I knew. Niall had somehow become someone I might not have recognized. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Says ‘nothin,’ gets nothin,’” Niall said down into the interior, as if he was sorry I was there. He closed the door and walked off into the shadows toward the refreshments.
I did not know what to do then. I briefly revisited being at the Prestige with my father and the good time we’d had. But those thoughts always ended with my father having a heart attack in the house in the middle of the night and being carted out on a stretcher, already dead. That could easily make me cry, which I didn’t want to do now and here. I did think, though, that Niall and I were just two boys—even if he could drive and drink and smoke and knew hures and was aware of things I wasn’t. Becoming stony and silent and being crabby about everything had, in fact, made him seem not older than me but even less grown-up than I was. As if his actual person was now being disclosed.
WHEN NIALL GOT BACK, HE’D BROUGHT A PAPER SACK OF POPCORN, which smelled good, but he didn’t offer any to me. He looked over as though he expected me to say something. But I didn’t intend to speak what I’d been thinking. It would’ve made him madder. Though I’d decided mad was not what he truly felt. There probably wasn’t a right word for how Niall truly felt. We were alike in that way, when all was said and done.
The feature had now begun out on the screen—the light cone shining over the car roofs, halfway illuminating them. People were hurrying back to their cars, laughing and talking. Beer cans were being opened and car doors slamming. A man said, very loud, “What the hell are you two doin’ back there? Don’t make me have to call the police.” A woman started laughing. “We’re married. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Eejits one ’n’ all,” Niall said and wound his window up so the speaker clanked against the glass. “Roll yours,” he said. “I don’t want to hear ’em start beltin’ away. The da’s bad enough every night.”
I did what he said, and the cool night air was immediately blocked, and I knew before very long we’d get hot. My head still ached, and I feared being hot would make me sick after the gin.
Paris Holiday was the title of the show. It was in bright, smudgy color and began on an ocean liner, with people dressed up and just walking around talking to one another. Some were speaking in a language that wasn’t English, which I guessed was supposed to be funny. A man with a large nose, wearing a fancy sport coat and a felt hat came in and just stood in the middle of the room, which was like a hotel lobby, and talked to all the people while trying not to smile. This was all that went on and wasn’t hilarious at all. I’d never seen Bob Hope, but understood this man with the big nose was him. His voice sounded like the voice I’d heard on the radio, when I’d listened with my parents. I hadn’t thought he was funny then either.
Niall, though, did think he was funny. He laughed loudly at things Bob Hope said, and at things one of the characters who spoke in the other language said. “Man, oh man, would you look at that,” Niall said about a pretty blond woman who came on the scene wearing a gray fur coat. “I’d be forced to give her a good swiving, I’d say. I guess the baby wouldn’t, of course.” He’d taken another drink out of his paper bag and hadn’t offered me any. I didn’t want it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“So you’re not entirely sure, is that right?” Niall said this as if I’d made him irate. I should’ve said I would, but I hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps I was a little tipsy.
“I would,” I said.
“Ya feeb. Course ya would,” Niall said. “That’s Anita Christ-a-mighty Ekberg. She’s Swedish. They fuck everybody.”
I looked at the blond woman, bigger on the screen than anything imaginable. The woman who was Anita Ekberg—a name I didn’t know—didn’t seem real. I didn’t understand how to think about fucking her. I’d only heard this word from boys in school, who told jokes about it. “If Anita Ekberg was sitting where I’m sitting and leaned over and said, ‘Hey, Harry, give us a wee poke,’ doubtless you wouldn’t know where to start. Would you?”
“I would,” I said.
“Ah, you wouldn’t. That’s plain as the egg.” Niall smiled at me in a scornful way. More things were happening on the screen. Bob Hope’s big misshapen face filled the picture, his eyes shifting this way and that, his nasty lip curling not in a real smile. Anita Ekberg could be seen walking down a long hallway, her high heels in her hand, carrying her fur coat. She was good-looking. Anybody would see that. Fucking her might not have been that hard, even if I didn’t know what I was doing.
And then for a while we
both just watched. Niall appeared to have berated me enough—calling me a feeb and telling me I had no etiquette. He himself laughed at all kinds of things on the screen—goings-on I couldn’t really get the sense of, though I laughed as if I did. “He’s speakin’ fuckin’ Frenchy,” Niall said about one of the players, a small fellow with a face like a horse who was looking mystified, though Bob Hope seemed to understand whatever he said. “French is fuckin’ lame,” Niall said. “Though it’s hilarious once you pin it down.” He had the sack out again. “Have a boost,” he said and reached it across. My head still ached, and I didn’t want a boost. The women in the car beside us were laughing to beat the band, and the men were whooping at the little horse-face character who was pretending to throw up on two old ladies in deck chairs. I took the sack and held it to my lips and let just the tiniest trickle get in. A clammy paper shred stuck to my tongue, plus a piece of popcorn. “Must be prudent,” Niall said. He no longer seemed angry. “We want you home upright.” The sip I did swallow didn’t burn or make my breathing stop. It was actually halfway sweet.
“Okay,” I said. I was happy he’d come back to his better self.
“I’m guessin’ you miss your ole dad an awful lot,” Niall said, his voice grown softer. He turned down the movie noise that was banging out of the speaker. People were laughing in the next car and in other cars. It had gotten warmer in the closed-up car, the way I knew it would. “Helluva thing,” he said and nodded at me. We’d never spoken about my father as a living person. Being friends with Niall had seemed good because that hadn’t been necessary. My father, dead or alive, was everywhere I turned. But not between Niall and me. Taking me to the movies and paying attention to me was a kind of secret sympathy. He could have taken the whore with him and gotten drunk and done whatever he wanted. He didn’t have to put up with me, who didn’t know anything and was always sad. A feeb.
