The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  In my block the bookie’s bird store had become bona fide. His life’s enthusiasm was these evenings, when he really sold birds and sunflower seeds. He sat on a bin in his pigeon coop engulfed in wings, while he talked through the wire to a couple of pals. The whole block was dream-like and misty, the light Parisian, with every building a different color and height and shape, the fire escapes zigzags of rusted orange, and the rooftops running along in a dum-de-dum-dum. Now I was squinting against the beauty—I must not be strong enough to live here. I caught a glimpse of two fencers upstairs in a loft, and a man inside a locked girdle store was playing his fiddle to a macaw. I looked at the lemons in the street stalls, at the mounded-up oysters and booties and Preen, feeling utterly flattened. That Ida’s future should depend upon what I might choose to do was the worst circumstance of all.

  She was plenty crazy at first that night: acute concentration on me. Her squeeze when we hugged was too strong to have any meaning as such and had none of the sexiness that was best at arousing concern.

  “Something happened?” she asked. She was stroking my back to loosen it. With her harrowed face, which was so much more anxious on my behalf than anyone else’s would have been, she looked at me with an open love that overwhelmed me in shame, that she should be sorry for me, tenderly reading my muscles for tension, after the way I had dodged in and out the last weeks. A large face, like a boy’s from medium range, like a woman’s if you were close or away several yards. Brown eyes, black sweaty hair, and that great wide survivor’s smile of hers, as serene as a smile in death. I got a fresh sight of this gritty girl who thought she was carrying a child by me and who was living on powdered eggs and charity clothes and plain lonely terrified misery. I realized how little I’d done, how execrable it would look to me in a few years if I hadn’t shut out the memory altogether. My god, how little I’d given her! Beer to help her relax at night? Not usually, unless we were necking. Blueberries, avocado, if I was having them? No, not unless we were eating together. A forkful of buttered string beans would have given her pleasure sometimes. I must have been mad—her son standing between my knees looked at least twice his age because of the life they were leading—I’d lost perspective completely!

  I ran out and got mushrooms, steak, and oregano and so on, and spoiled the meal only by hardly talking. Tony wanted the fathering element of it in equal proportion with the food, so he sat on my lap to eat, which he did with politeness and dignity. It was a funny meal. My affection for him gushed up until I could scarcely swallow, watching his every move, and with Ida I was the penitent husband. I’d forgot how at home we could be, although she assumed my silence was because of her pregnancy. But her glance lost its glaze; she got peaceful and sweet. She drew the big circles under my eyes with her finger.

  “You’ve had a worse time, haven’t you? You’ve worried more. You’re very generous. Yes, you are,” she said when I shook my head. “And I’m not after you, you know, that’s not what I want, you mustn’t feel any pressure like that.” At her simplest and most attractive, she went on about how nice I’d been. She meant it, but at the same time I was thinking that we were half married already, and how fine it was to have supper this way, that to go through the further formalities might be right for me too. Once she was given a little stability, there would be just her warmth, no jaggedness. I couldn’t bear picturing the boy dragged off to an orphanage, and felt protectively head-of-the-house. I began reaching under the table, and told her the accident story, more detached about it than I would have imagined an hour before. We hurried the dishes, mouth to the sweater already, and got Tony to sleep. She was a bit gaspier than I liked but very giving. Small breasts with large nipples, and an overall skinny toughness I loved—geisha-small feet with high arches, a mouth like a plum. It was another night when the loops bound around us made us relish each other all the more.

  The next day we found out the loops didn’t exist. I stayed home from work to get over the pushcart episode and she came in at noon from the doctor’s and said he had made up his mind it was a false pregnancy. The explanation was skimpy because we had paid out so much already she didn’t pay to have a long conference; but we scarcely hugged once after that. I left the house in blank angry relief and didn’t go near her apartment for almost two weeks. I sought out a Negro girl I’d been flirting with, to enter that brittle, tight little set, the dark half of which wanted to go up in the world and the white half of which wanted to go down. Since I, of course, wanted to go up like the Negroes, I didn’t quite fit at the parties. She was the life and direction at them. She was impatient, tense, prickly, a virtuoso with people. We had one banner day, plus three club-foot attempts to repeat.

  The district absorbed me all over again. I wandered as I hadn’t since first arriving. Moist, late December weather with wind and sun, when winter hovered just overhead, giving one more day’s grace, now another. I got the exuberant sense that here in one spot was my whole fellow family of man. The racial mix on the streets brought a racial peace which was affecting if you went into other parts of the city. For both colors the process was rather like learning to fly—so many thousands of hours of looking to be put in—and down here we’d gotten farther along. Avenue C had a small-town flavor. Because of the cobblestones and the loose babies, traffic crept; the pedestrians virtually ignored it, so that there was a vacation atmosphere. I used to go into the Siberia branch of the Chemical Bank for the fun of looking at who was assigned there. This was in a grotesquely ancient building across from a live poultry market and a garment ends warehouse, and the tellers were dazed from their banishment from Madison Avenue. Italian ices had been sold out of baby carriages by Puerto Ricans during the fall, and practically every block had its shul. A shul was a hole-in-the-wall synagogue with four or five Stars of David built into the front, looking defiant and jubilant, from some ghetto in Europe and bursting with hope. In the zany designs of a lot of the blocks you could see the failed architects who at last had been left a free hand; they sometimes went Moorish to celebrate. The neighborhood was as rich historically as the western range of the same period, but was being bulldozed away. I strolled and gazed through the misty weekends—at the patchworks of relic wallpaper on the sites half-demolished, at the wash lines, the three downtown bridges—snacking on Old Country foods, and talking such talk as one enjoys slightly wistfully with a cab driver in more affluent years.

  At the lab I tinked tunes on the urine bottles, lining them up. I treated the test frogs to beef liver for having been right about Ida from the start. Darwin was chiseling holes for a new wiring system. Five months instead of five years seemed the prognostication for him. He was eating graham crackers globbed with butter (“I can’t stop”) and got bigger and bigger, more like an overblown boy of fourteen. The woman whose door we left food at was also taking a turn for the worse. Twice she let her sink run until it overflowed. When we picked the lock we discovered her sitting in bed with her feet drawn up under her, watching the water. She creamed her skin and dyed her hair yellow, so it was hard to tell if she was senile or out of her mind.

  I understood Darwin’s fondness for mice. If you look at them they’re graceful and comely. You can see them as panthers, you can see them as pandas. They cluck like a muffled henhouse, whereas guinea pigs sound like puppies down in the cellar. Light as a leaf and taut-legged, they skittered about their cages and sneezed from the bits of sawdust stirred up. They scratched their ears and cleaned their tails nattily and basked upon piles of each other as on piles of cushions, holding a nibble of food in their paws. Given food, they’d hurriedly wash their faces before feeling ready to eat, and when they were hunched on their hams, their shoulders bulged out like extra pouch cheeks. Their tails were their pride and spiritual spine; they always were handling them, bending them around to clean and inspect. Stiff, up-curved tails signaled a fight; or a nervous mouse, with kissing noises, vibrated his tail out stiff and straight. After endearing, midget yawns, they often slept in a row like suckling pigs,
and pressed their paws against their cheeks. Or they burrowed head first in a pile so that just their fat rears and pink, bird legs and rubber-hose tails stuck out. As they sickened, their white tails zoned into gray; they sagged and wizened like little sand bags. Sometimes they fled death in leaps, so that it clenched them in mid-air and they thudded down. Sometimes they lay on their sides, scrubbing their noses in spasms and coughing and sneezing, and went rigid like that, rolled up in the pose in which they’d been born and scrubbing their pulsating nostrils. But it was generally a homey, humming room; Darwin and I often went in there.

  My problems were solving themselves. If I was too scared to quit my job, the job was foundering under me. Obviously there would soon be no job. Although I was still at my window and my preoccupation with the violence got worse, I didn’t dash down to the street so much. I avoided knots of the Harlem Negroes who worked near us, and I would break into sweats of fear at odd moments, walking through a dark block on the way home—I developed a whiz-along walk. The subway was more than ever like an armed camp and, when I came out, I would see everybody facing in one direction and a man there trying to box with a bus. One day a cement truck stopped revolving. Rather than funny it was frenetic. The driver cried. I’d gotten infallible at sensing a fight, sensing its start and exactly its course. Seeing people clumping in front of me, I’d usually turn off but sometimes I kept numbly on through the thick of it as if mesmerized.

  The garage crowd amused itself by setting off leftover firecrackers from the horde they’d blackmarketed during the summer. They were having a lazy spell and would hire a passing bum to do some of their chores for a quarter or so. Ida was jumpy with me once our Christmas reunion was over, and Tony, taking his cue, was also cool. Yet we remained a threesome. He’d run away from me but when I caught him and lifted him up he hugged me even as he was struggling. Ida was furious at my treating her like a taboo object. She moved away as if not to let me touch her any time I came close. Although I couldn’t conceive of sleeping with her after the suffering that we had gone through, her person still seemed as much mine as a wife’s. I refused to stay out of her room when she dressed. I pinched her elbows to see what she weighed and if she was eating enough. I touched my tongue to her forehead if she looked pale to feel what her temperature was. I used to rub her whenever we talked—rubbed and rubbed. I’d spank or order her around, give gifts as usual, fondle and advise her son—everything except sleep with her. Now that her life wasn’t a shambles, wasn’t about to break apart, she was left with it, which was not very pleasant either. It was a precarious, temporary sort of friendship we had, both of us riding along until I would go my way.

  January was uneventfully dreary. The boiler next door blew up and ours went on the blink for a week out of sympathy. One afternoon, at work, late again about six, I heard the electric horn blast, “You goddam spear-carrier!” A bum hadn’t washed a car well enough but wanted his money. I winced at the window, it was all so familiar. The four mechanics were cutting across the lot in diagonal paths, toward the man or away after their monkey wrenches. The wife of the thin one was in the station, so he was trying to subdue his cousins a little, walking slower than them, waving his hand. The fellow was standing his ground on the theory that perseverance would carry him through. Standing quietly, he wasn’t easy to see because his color just matched the shade of the darkness. His clothes showed up better. He was dead still. You had to look twice. He was only about in his forties, and everything happened very fast. When he saw the crowbars, he used language too. I was violently agitated. My face had lurched into a flinch; I’d stopped breathing. I was so clocked into the gears of this kind of stuff that every part of my body went sick as if as part of an allergy attack—I knew, I knew, I moved like one of the gears myself.

  I was tearing downstairs. Outside, the whites were already in a half moon around the guy (the wife in the office door). “It was a shit, nigger job. You don’t get nothing for that,” said the blast-vigor brother with the voice like a highway horn. He had really too much energy to focus it on the one guy. The fat brother slouched in a posture of venom, but the muscle-bound hired man was less interested in hurting someone than in being strong. My lean opponent was between, holding them off as he cursed in an undertone for the Negro to run. In harassment he pointed at me as if “look what was coming.”

  “I done a good enough job. You weren’t paying nothing but chicken feed anyhow. What do you want? You want to gyp me,” said the man. He muttered that slavery wasn’t going on any more. Not young, not quite humbled down into middle age, he was in the galled period of life when he had no impulsiveness left to save him. They encircled him, seeing how he took it, poking at his calves with a tire iron, and they called him one or two names. The auto trunks where they kept their weapons gaped open sinisterly. I’d drifted to the edge of the sidewalk on my side of the street with my tentative gait, my quick-backtrack gait, which had saved a great many necks by this time, including my own.

  “I done a good job for you and you’re going to keep my money?” He hadn’t determined upon defiance, it was just happening. “What a poor sack of fish you are. You’re cheapskates. Go on back to your tiddle-prick then. Go play with yourselves.”

  A moment went by before they could believe their ears. As one man, they turned and rushed for the woman, roaring, to drive her inside. The circle opened for that, but he still wasn’t running; it was written into the lines of his body that he wasn’t running. I’d never been faced with a situation where there was no running, so all my gingerly jumpiness was no help to me. I was picking my legs up and putting them down, twitching them almost like some sort of tail, but nevertheless remained frozen right where I was. I was nothing, unable to cross the street, unable to function. When they came back their feet shook the pavement, and a visible panic pushed up through his knees. The lean mechanic pointed at me to hold me where I was, and it was as though I were pressing against a thick pane of glass. The fellow did try to escape but had waited a second too long. They ran him into the wall and held him there tight, waving their shovels and irons. “Call the cops! Call the cops!” they were yelling to Musclebound, in order to establish that they had phoned first and that an attack on them by the Negro had followed Musclebound’s call. He shoved a dime in the phone, beating on it. I could see the white faces like flowers behind me in our building’s windows. It was closing time; most of the lights were off; the cobbler was getting into his coat. I think I was yelling—at least my mouth was open. The Negro had covered his face with his hands. Since he didn’t try to dodge loose, they didn’t hit him more than a couple of times. I was weeping with the collapse of my nerves and because I’d done nothing; I’d been unable even to move.

  The police dispersed all of us, finally. I was shaking and finished with this. After spending a few days at home sleeping, drinking milkshakes, I called up an uncle of mine in the Midwest and borrowed enough to move uptown and devote myself to making a different start in the city.

  I Have a Bid

  ON A FARM ON THE LAKE ROAD IN ATHOL, among the chickens that fed on the hay seeds on the floor of the barn, were a blue-tailed rooster and a frazzled red hen. The hen, though she had once been a regular layer, had gotten so nervous lately that she’d almost stopped because several others picked on her, pecking hard at her neck and tail feathers, making her run from the rest of the flock. The rooster, nearly as unhappy, was an extra. He hadn’t been eaten at the broiler stage because he had looked so energetic and promising but, not being number one or even number two, had been much bitten by the older roosters, who still outweighed him. Like her, he had lost some of his feathers and was scabbed on his comb and rear end, so, one spring evening when Mr. and Mrs. Clark were going to the Tuesday-night livestock auction to sell a couple of newborn bull calves that they didn’t want to bother raising as vealers, they caught the hen and rooster as an afterthought, grabbing them off their perches with the aid of a flashlight, stuffing them into a gunnysack, and tying the neck shut.
Clarence and Helen Clark were a bulldog couple. They’d been able to burn their mortgage papers ceremoniously years ago and had sent two of their three kids through Lyndon State College’s full program to become white-collar folk in the cities downcountry. Close-knit, they spoke the same language, active in the Elks, the Masons, and the Athol Grange. He’d had heart surgery once, but was fit nowadays, still milking twice a day, with Helen’s help, fifty-one Holsteins and two Jerseys for cream.

  The sale was held in a low, sagging, peeling building, the former livery stable behind Athol’s hundred-year-old, three-story hotel. Inside were pens containing half a dozen sheep somebody wanted to get rid of, a few pigs and piglets, goats, and twenty or thirty grown cows, but mostly a great many calves of both sexes and many sizes, a few days or several weeks old, each with a number scrawled on a disc of paper that was glued to its hip. The cows were elderly ladies whose milk production had fallen off, or maybe prime milkers who’d ruined themselves simply by treading on a teat when they’d stood up, or young ones that had caught an infection they couldn’t shake off, or good producers the farmer was selling to pay his tax bill, or buy his kid a second-hand car. This fellow would stay to watch the proceedings, or pick up a new animal for himself. But Rog Boyle, the auctioneer, had a poker game afterward where you could lose that money for the tax bill or the new cow or the graduation-present car before you even got home.

  A couple of bidders for the slaughterhouses down Boston way were sitting in the small set of bleachers by the auction ring. Each of them had a slat-sided tractor trailer parked outside, as well as the dealer who owned a local killing-house nearby, to keep them honest. One of the packing-house bidders, too, operating his own semi-rig, was from town—Al Boyle, Rog’s younger brother. When the auction finally closed, about 1 a.m., he’d highball down to Massachusetts and bring back a check by noon that might clear him more money than the dry-cleaning establishment he also operated had earned during the rest of the week.