The title was perfect: “Now You’re in the Box!” and he had a vague idea what the title meant to him; it was intended to show that everyone is born boxed-in, and the hero had to realize that before he could truly become a man.
But somehow, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t right.
He shoved back from the kitchen table and slammed his palm against the stack of originals and carbons. “Oh, damn,” he muttered, and snubbed the fortieth cigarette of the day. He stood up and rubbed the grainy feeling from his eyes.
He had started writing at five-thirty that morning, hoping to cork off a solid five thousand words that day, but the problems had been the same ones of the past month: restlessness, anger at himself, frustration. He just could not get inside his people. It was painful.
He walked about the tiny apartment, picking up dust on his fingertips from first this piece of furniture, then that. The image of the caged animal came to him and he chucked it away forcibly, grimacing at his own cliché.
He wandered back to the kitchen table and the silently accusing strange face of the portable, the unsullied stack of white bond, the jaundiced stack of second sheets. “Henry Willits Jefferson,” he spoke to the stove, “you are not doing one damned thing to justify the title of Great White Hope of American Letters. No, you are not.”
He reached for another cigarette. Number forty-one.
But there were only two packs available that morning, twenty to a pack, and he had smoked them all. That’s right, he said to himself, stunt the creative process with a nicotine fit.
He chuckled and walked through the apartment to the front door. The hall smelled even worse today; Mrs. Killingsworth was cooking something even more vile than her beans and sauerkraut of the day before. A miasma of cloying proportions hung in the dim second-floor hall. He fled down the stairs quickly.
Mr. Brenner was behind the meat counter when Hank walked into the little one-arm grocery, and the heavy-bodied grocer wiped his big, wide, blocky hands free of blood when he saw Hank.
“What’ll it be, Mr. Jefferson?” Brenner asked, strolling quickly around the checkout counter where Hank waited.
The words Three packs of Marlboros were ready at his lips, but never made their debut. The Negro came up close beside him and shoved the gun out in front of Hank, almost directly into Brenner’s ample stomach.
“Open that registuh and hand me out whut you got in theah,” he mouthed with a faint Southern accent.
It was so sudden, Hank did not realize a holdup was taking place. Peculiarly, all he could think at the moment was: He must have just come from down South somewhere, and can’t find work; he’s desperate, this is so foolish!
Brenner was hesitating, staring at the colored boy oddly. Hank shot a long glance at the boy, and the fine, high forehead and alert, dark eyes registered clearly. Still Brenner did not move.
“Ah said please open that registuh and hand ovuh what’s there,” the boy said again. “Ah’m bein’ poh-lite now, Mistuh. Dohn’t make me get nasty.”
Brenner chuckled, then. It was a rotten, unclean chuckle. “Who the hell you think you’re scarin’ with that water pistol, kid?” he snapped. His hand shot out.
Gunless, the boy realized he had failed miserably, and suddenly bolted, jarring Hank as he ran away.
“Black sonofabitch!” Mr. Brenner mouthed, his cheeks suffusing with blood. “I’ll show that lousy nigger!”
He banged down a button on the cash register and the little bell rang as the drawer slammed open. He pulled the drawer forward and from a compartment behind the change shelf drew a small revolver. No water pistol; real; death.
“No!” Hank heard himself say.
Mr. Brenner gave him a peculiar, lingering glance that took a quarter-instant, before he threw himself around the checkout counter, and pounded out the front door.
Hank stood there only a moment, then followed, feeling foolish, finding himself running also.
The colored boy had cut across the street, dodging cars, and Hank could see Mr. Brenner only fifteen or twenty feet behind him as they raced down the street. Hank barely missed being hit by a car as he gained the opposite sidewalk, and ran after them.
The Negro was throwing his head back and forth wildly, looking for a certain area of escape. No alley or fence presented itself, and in desperation the boy turned into the shallow hallway of an apartment building set close to the sidewalk. He was inside, and Hank could hear him pulling at the door.
It was locked.
The colored boy fell down on his knees, then turned back facing the street. His hands were wide away from his body, and his eyes shined wet-white in his face.
“I’m unahmed, I’m unahmed!” he screamed as Mr. Brenner ground to a halt before him, aiming the tiny revolver at the boy’s head. The boy’s mouth was wide-open to scream again when Mr. Brenner pulled the trigger.
It knocked every tooth loose from the Negro’s head, and it tore a gigantic clot from the back of his head as it ripped through his mouth. The boy fell back against the glass door, the locked door, and stained it as he slipped sidewise.
“I worked twelve years in that store,” Mr. Brenner said to the corpse, unnecessarily; and abruptly, Hank knew precisely what the title of his book meant.
2. THE ROCKS OF GOGROTH
So it had come down to this, finally, as Spence had known it would. All along he had known he would have to make a decision, and every time he thought of it, he went cold inside.
F. J. Gogroth was a man who would find it anathema to accept someone’s disliking his beer. “The best goddam malt processing in the game,” he often said. Gogroth Beer was more than a firm to F. J. Gogroth; it was a way of life.
And to participate in the rewards of that way of life—even in the secular capacity of advertising account executive—every member of the firm had to believe.
So how could Spence tell F. J. Gogroth that his plans for the new advertising campaign were ludicrous, misrepresentative and, worst of all, God forbid, doomed to failure? How could he tell him, when it meant doubting the Way of Life?
That would mean dissatisfaction on Gogroth’s part; more, it would mean fury and retaliation. The sort of retaliation that would force Spence’s bosses at HHC&M regretfully to release him. Gogroth was too big an account to chance losing. It was easier to dump the blame on Spence and lose him.
Spence took another cone of water from the cooler, and eyed the advertising presentation in its leather case, lying on the reception room couch. In that case—the size of a card-table top—was an advertising campaign that had been constructed along the lines F. J. Gogroth had suggested. Suggested, in this case, being synonymous with ordered. A campaign that would cost his firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales losses.
Emotionally annoying; subliminally repugnant; subconsciously negative-thought producing…the catch-phrases popped into Spence’s mind, but he knew they would never fit into Mr. Gogroth’s view of the universe.
He sat down, praying the receptionist would not receive that buzz from within. The buzz that would tell her Mr. Gogroth’s current supplicator had gone and she could send in the next visitor with his oblation.
How the hell did I ever get into this racket?
It was a demoralizing question he had asked himself, and he put it from himself with a mental wrenching. It was a racket, like any other, and just because he was going to get dumped when Gogroth informed the boss young Spence was not thinking pro-Gogroth, was no reason to damn the entire industry.
Dumped…
Then an idea came to him, and he liked it even less than the concept of himself being fired.
The idea remained with him despite his attempts to drown it in a flood of scruples and morality.
There was Jean and her need for worldly possessions. That McCobb sofa and chair suite would run a good fifteen hundred, and a man out of work cannot afford to buy Paul McCobb furniture, or Saarinen chairs, or any of the other fantastic implements of what Jean called “the good li
fe.”
Could he afford to lose Jean?
Because that would be one of the resultant consequences of telling old man Gogroth the truth. And if he didn’t—what then?
Why then, I’m compromising, he told himself acidly, and all the good nonfiction books on the subject say that is a moral sin for the thinking man in our time, as well as bad for the soul, the talent, and the complexion.
He didn’t give a damn about compromising, not really. It was something he could not afford to give a damn about. That was for guys with other problems, in other rackets. It was a tough life. All the similes about the Madison Avenue jungle. Other guys with other problems.
Not the problem of Mr. Gogroth and his rocks.
So there was another way out.
There was the simple way out of sharking someone else. Making someone else guilty. If the campaign went as it was planned—and there was no question it was a really bad, insulting campaign—Gogroth would lose a mint, and he was going to demand a head be chopped.
Again, Spence did not care if Gogroth lost his shirt, uppers, and lowers entirely. It might do the fat bastard some good at that to taste poverty.
But what about me?
He had known poverty, and Jean had left him nine times in three years. Okay, so she was mercenary, and the good life appealed more than the poverty. Was that a crime? He knew only that he could not live without her, and if it took lying a little, compromising a little, setting someone else up for the kill a little…that was the price one had to pay. Or make someone else pay.
So the idea clung like a porous plaster.
Make it Gerry Coogan’s idea, Gerry Coogan’s baby all the way. It was in the way you phrased it: “Our boy Gerry Coogan did all the prep work on this, F. J.” and “Remember that name, F. J.; Gerry Coogan’s the boy who set this up so beautifully for you.”
Sure it was a rat trick. That was the law of the jungle. Eat or—oh hell!
He knew he couldn’t do it. Coogan needed the job as badly as he did. He had two kids, and that extra after-hours work as a commercial artist wasn’t helping out as much as a man in Coogan’s position needed. Not with one of the kids being eaten by a tumor.
No, he decided, he couldn’t do it. Jean would just have to take their life together as he was able to provide it, or they’d have to part the ways. It was that simple.
The buzz startled him, and for a second after the receptionist’s dulcet tones advised him, “You may go in now, Mr. Spence,” he sat there.
Then, rising, he tucked the case under his arm and strode up to F. J. Gogroth’s door. That man could really throw the rocks…
“Good morning, F. J.,” he chirped gaily, marching into the presence. “Say, this is one helluva wild promotion we’ve got shored up for you. One of our best men was the real brain behind it. A guy we’re really proud to have on the team…”
3. PAYMENT RETURNED, UNOPENED
For her it had been Halley’s Comet in her closed hand, sharp pinwheels of light and fire whirling. For him it had been a fast lay on a chick with a harelip. And from this union there came three: a sorrow burning steadily, a hag-riding guilt, and a foetus.
Claude Hammel was a first-year dental student; he waited tables at the ZBT house to make expenses (though working for all those yids bothered him), and he knew he could not marry her.
So, logically enough, he went to a fortuneteller.
“Why do I have to tell you all that?” he asked, already firmly convinced she was a charlatan—so why the hell had he come here in the first place?
“I have to know what you consider the truth of it, so that I may more correctly interpret the future as it will affect you.” Her hair was caught up under a brightly colored babushka and the color of the cloth was challenged by the crimson that chain-reactioned in her wrinkled cheeks and her pipe-bowl nose. She drank, it was there in the wreckage of her face.
“But if I tell you why I came, what good can you do me…tell me that, will you?”
She spread her hands, and he felt trapped, somehow. “You came because you were walking and saw this place, and wanted an answer. Do you want the answer…or any answer?” So he told her about the rooming house where he lived, and about Ann. How she had been crying in her basement room and how he had taken advantage of it, telling her he loved her.
“I don’t know, it was just, it was, hell, I don’t know. I just did it!”
She stared at him levelly. “And now she is with child and the idea of marrying a harelipped girl repulses you. I can understand that.” Her gaze was cynical, mocking.
“That isn’t it at all,” he jumped to defend himself. “I just can’t, I mean, I can’t marry anyone right now. Not Princess Grace if I’d knocked her, I mean, excuse me, if she was available. I’ve got to finish school.”
The gypsy stared at him for a terrible moment.
“She might kill herself,” she ventured.
“Oh, come on!” he derided the idea. No one took their life these days over something like that.
“All right, then,” she said, clasping her wrinkled fingers. He noticed her joints were arthritically swollen and somehow it disturbed him more than her gaze or words. “Here’s the answer to your problem…”
He leaned forward. Oddly, he believed she might have a solution. It was cockeyed, but that was the way with life, and he was desperate.
“There is safety in numbers,” she said softly.
He waited expectantly, but she was finished.
“And?” he asked.
“Pay me now, then go away.” Her voice was very cool and businesslike. The conference was concluded.
“Hey, what the hell kind of a fortune is that?” he demanded angrily. He felt cheated.
“Pay me and then go,” she repeated. There was something deadly in her tone. He reached into his pocket and brought out a dollar bill, almost without realizing he was doing it. Her eyes held him fascinated: cobra and mongoose.
When he was outside, walking the foggy night back toward the campus, he pondered what she had said. At first it made no sense whatever. Then it made a great deal of sense, and it frightened him so much he stopped and swallowed with difficulty.
It was a terrible thing to consider.
He stopped at the first liquor store he could find and bought a fifth of Black & White. He knew she would be at home; she lived alone and no one called her for dates.
She was pleased to see him, timorous at first, fearing her news of earlier that day would have driven him away.
Her hair was very soft, and brown, and reminded him in an obscure way of the robin’s wings. She wore it long, in a forties-style pageboy that flattered the long planes of her face. Her eyes were also very brown and moist. It was a nice face.
Except for the harelip, which he stared at in fascination. A fascination she took to be unconcern born of attraction for her as a whole. She thought he did not notice. She was wrong.
It took him only an hour and forty minutes to get her drunk enough where his watery explanation of why he had to leave for a few minutes seemed logical to her. “I’ll be right back,” he said in her ear. She was staring dimly at the ceiling from her position on the couch with eyes that saw very little.
“I’ll turn out the lights,” he said.
“You’ll be back, won’t you?” she begged him.
“I’ll be back,” he said, cold and wooden inside.
He found ten guys he knew at the Double-Decker, having malts and salamiburgers, and he clued them in. It wasn’t quite as he told it, but they accepted his story. He led them back to the rooming house, and sent the first guy down into the darkness of the basement room with a slap on the back.
Her passionate moan sounded final, and while he waited with others, smoking, he recalled what the gypsy had said. Somehow, he could not bring himself to chuckle.
4. THE TRUTH
I’d spent the whole day down at the Union Hall, trying to pick up a good horn, but anybody who’d have fitted in was either out
on the cultural exchange bit or blowing on the Coast.
There were half a dozen fat lips lying around, there always are, but I wouldn’t have spit on the best of them. Which left me right where I’d started when Cookie had come down with a bad case of holding and the fuzz had carted him away to Lexington. I could’ve told them they were flapping their wings out-of-rhythm; Cookie’d rather die than lose his monkey.
But he’d been the best horn in town.
Which left us an important side short, going into the most impressive gig of our career. Saul Maxim wasn’t paying us for a four-man quintet, and I was about to call one of the numbers I’d taken from those dogs at the Hall, when this kid came into Maxim’s, with a horn case tucked tight under his wing.
He looked around, mostly at us on the stand, and finally gave it the leg. He was tall, with a sort of loose-limbed Mulligan look about him, crewcut, nice face, and the white muscle ridge on his upper lip that was his membership badge in the trumpeter’s club. Looked like a nice-enough kid, and the boys stopped screwing around as he walked up to the stand.
“You Art Staff, ’round here?” he asked.
I nodded and stuck out my hand. “The same. Something I can do for you?”
He took the hand and looked me cold in the eyes with, “The word’s been goin’ around you need a horn. I was on the loose, so I figured I’d come over, give it a try. You still needing?”
“We’re still needing,” I said, “if you can do the work. It’s five sets a night, and you’ll get scale. That sound okay?”
He shrugged. It didn’t seem to matter. “Fine by me. Want I should audition now?”
I was about to say go ahead but Arville Dreiser, our drummer, whistled loud behind me. “Want to hold it a minute, Art? Call of nature.”
I gave him the go-ahead and he cut for the sandbox. I invited the kid to sit down and jaw with me for a couple minutes. He set the case right beside himself, and slumped onto the stand beside me. “What’s your name?” I asked.
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