The Day of the Locust

by Nathanael West

  25

  Tod went into the living room to see how Homer was getting on. He was still on the couch, but had changed his position. He had curled his big body into a ball. His knees were drawn up almost to his chin, his elbows were tucked in close and his hands were against his chest. But he wasn’t relaxed. Some inner force of nerve and muscle was straining to make the ball tighter and still tighter. He was like a steel spring which has been freed of its function in a machine and allowed to use all its strength centripetally. While part of a machine the pull of the spring had been used against other and stronger forces, but now, free at last, it was striving to attain the shape of its original coil.

  Original coil…In a book of abnormal psychology borrowed from the college library, he had once seen a picture of a woman sleeping in a net hammock whose posture was much like Homer’s. “Uterine Flight,” or something like that, had been the caption under the photograph. The woman had been sleeping in the hammock without changing her position, that of the foetus in the womb, for a great many years. The doctors of the insane asylum had been able to awaken her for only short periods of time and those months apart.

  He sat down to smoke a cigarette and wondered what he ought to do. Call a doctor? But after all Homer had been awake most of the night and was exhausted. The doctor would shake him a few times and he would yawn and ask what the matter was. He could try to wake him up himself. But hadn’t he been enough of a pest already? He was so much better off asleep, even if it was a case of “Uterine Flight.”

  What a perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm there, and the feeding was automatic. Everything perfect in that hotel. No wonder the memory of those accommodations lingered in the blood and nerves of everyone. It was dark, yes, but what a warm, rich darkness. The grave wasn’t in it. No wonder one fought so desperately against being evicted when the nine months’ lease was up.

  Tod crushed his cigarette. He was hungry and wanted his dinner, also a double Scotch and soda. After he had eaten, he would come back and see how Homer was. If he was still asleep, he would try to wake him. If he couldn’t, he might call a doctor.

  He took another look at him, then tiptoed out of the cottage, shutting the door carefully.

  26

  Tod didn’t go directly to dinner. He went first to Hodge’s saddlery store thinking he might be able to find out something about Earle and through him about Faye. Calvin was standing there with a wrinkled Indian who had long hair held by a bead strap around his forehead. Hanging over the Indian’s chest was a sandwich board that read—

  TUTTLE’S TRADING POST for GENUINE RELICS OF THE OLD WEST Beads, Silver, Jewelry, Moccasins, Dolls, Toys, Rare Books, Postcards. TAKE BACK A SOUVENIR from TUTTLE’S TRADING POST

  Calvin was always friendly.

  “‘Lo, Char,” he called out, when Tod came up.

  “Meet the chief,” he added, grinning. “Chief Kiss-My-Towkus.”

  The Indian laughed heartily at the joke.

  “You gotta live,” he said.

  “Earle been around today?” Tod asked.

  “Yop. Went by an hour ago.”

  “We were at a party last night and I…”

  Calvin broke in by hitting his thigh a wallop with the flat of his palm.

  “That must’ve been some shindig to hear Earle tell it. Eh, Skookum?”

  “Vas you dere, Sharley?” the Indian agreed, showing the black inside of his mouth, purple tongue and broken orange teeth.

  “I heard there was a fight after I left.”

  Calvin smacked his thigh again.

  “Sure musta been. Earle get himself two black eyes,

  “That’s what comes of palling up with a dirty greaser,” said the Indian excitedly.

  He and Calvin got into a long argument about Mexicans. The Indian said that they were all bad. Calvin claimed he had known quite a few good ones in his time. When the Indian cited the case of the Hermanos brothers who had killed a lonely prospector for half a dollar, Calvin countered with a long tale about a man called Tomas Lopez who shared his last pint of water with a stranger when they both were lost in the desert.

  Tod tried to get the conversation back to what interested him.

  “Mexicans are very good with women,” he said.

  “Better with horses,” said the Indian. “I remember one time along the Brazos, I…”

  Tod tried again.

  “They fought over Earle’s girl, didn’t they?”

  “Not to hear him tell it,” Calvin said. “He claims it was dough—claims the Mex robbed him while he was sleeping.”

  “The dirty, thievin’ rat,” said the Indian, spitting.

  “He claims he’s all washed up with that bitch,” Calvin went on.

  “Yes, siree, that’s his story, to hear him tell it” Tod had enough.

  “So long,” he said.

  “Glad to meet you,” said the Indian.

  “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” Calvin shouted after him.

  Tod wondered if she had gone with Miguel. He thought it more likely that she would go back to work for Mrs. Jenning. But either way she would come out all right. Nothing could hurt her. She was like a cork. No matter how rough the sea got, she would go dancing over the same waves that sank iron ships and tore away piers of reinforced concrete. He pictured her riding a tremendous sea. Wave after wave reared its ton on ton of solid water and crashed down only to have her spin gaily away.

  When he arrived at Musso Frank’s restaurant, he ordered a steak and a double Scotch. The drink came first and he sipped it with his inner eye still on the spinning cork.

  It was a very pretty cork, gilt with a glittering fragment of mirror set in its top. The sea in which it danced was beautiful, green in the trough of the waves and silver at their tips. But for all their moon-driven power, they could do no more than net the bright cork for a moment in a spume of intricate lace. Finally it was set down on a strange shore where a savage with pork-sausage fingers and a pimpled butt picked it up and hugged it to his sagging belly. Tod recognized the fortunate man; he was one of Mrs. Kenning’s customers.

  The waiter brought his order and paused with bent back for him to comment. In vain. Tod was far too busy to inspect the steak.

  “Satisfactory, sir?” asked the waiter.

  Tod waved him away with a gesture more often used on flies. The waiter disappeared. Tod tried the same gesture on what he felt, but the driving itch refused to go. If only he had the courage to wait for her some night and hit her with a bottle and rape her.

  He knew what it would be like lurking in the dark in a vacant lot, waiting for her. Whatever that bird was that sang at night in California would be bursting its heart in theatrical runs and quavers and the chill night air would smell of spice pink. She would drive up, turn the motor off, look up at the stars, so that her breasts reared, then toss her head and sigh. She would throw the ignition keys into her purse and snap it shut, then get out of the car. The long step she took would make her tight dress pull up so that an inch of glowing flesh would show above her black stocking. As he approached carefully, she would be pulling her dress down, smoothing it nicely over her hips.

  “Faye, Faye, just a minute,” he would call.

  “Why, Tod, hello.”

  She would hold her hand out to him at the end of her long arm that swooped so gracefully to join her curving shoulder.

  “You scared me!”

  She would look like a deer on the edge of the road when a truck comes unexpectedly around a bend.

  He could feel the cold bottle he held behind his back and the forward step he would take to bring…”Is there anything wrong with it, sir?”

  The fly-like waiter had come back. Tod waved at him, but this time the man continued to hover.

  “Perhaps you would like me to take it back, sir?”

  “No, no.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  But he didn’t le
ave. He waited to make sure that the customer was really going to eat. Tod picked up his knife and cut a piece. Not until he had also put some boiled potato in his mouth did the man leave.

  Tod tried to start the rape going again, but he couldn’t feel the bottle as he raised it to strike. He had to give it up. The waiter came back. Tod looked at the steak. It was a very good one, but he wasn’t hungry any more.

  “A check, please.”

  “No dessert, sir?”

  “No, thank you, just a check.”

  “Check it is, sir,” the man said brightly as he fumbled for his pad and pencil.

  27

  When Tod reached the street, he saw a dozen great violet shafts of light moving across the evening sky in wide crazy sweeps. Whenever one of the fiery columns reached the lowest point of its arc, it lit for a moment the rose-colored domes and delicate minarets of Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre. The purpose of this display was to signal the world premiere of a new picture.

  Turning his back on the searchlights, he started in the opposite direction, toward Homer’s place. Before he had gone very far, he saw a clock that read a quarter past six and changed his mind about going back just yet. He might as well let the poor fellow sleep for another hour and kill some time by looking at the crowds.

  When still a block from the theatre, he saw an enormous electric sign that hung over the middle of the street. In letters ten feet high he read that

  “MR. KAHN A PLEASURE DOME DECREED”

  Although it was still several hours before the celebrities would arrive, thousands of people had already gathered. They stood facing the theatre with their backs toward the gutter in a thick line hundreds of feet long. A big squad of policemen was trying to keep a lane open between the front rank of the crowd and the facade of the theatre.

  Tod entered the lane while the policeman guarding it was busy with a woman whose parcel had torn open, dropping oranges all over the place. Another policeman shouted for him to get the hell across the street, but he took a chance and kept going. They had enough to do without chasing him. He noticed how worried they looked and how careful they tried to be. If they had to arrest someone, they joked good-naturedly with the culprit, making light of it until they got him around the corner, then they whaled him with their clubs. Only so long as the man was actually part of the crowd did they have to be gentle.

  Tod had walked only a short distance along the narrow lane when he began to get frightened. People shouted, commenting on his hat, his carriage, and his clothing. There was a continuous roar of catcalls, laughter and yells, pierced occasionally by a scream. The scream was usually followed by a sudden movement in the dense mass and part of it would surge forward wherever the police line was weakest. As soon as that part was rammed back, the bulge would pop out somewhere else.

  The police force would have to be doubled when the stars started to arrive. At the sight of their heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demoniac. Some little gesture, either too pleasing or too offensive, would start it moving and then nothing but machine guns would stop it. Individually the purpose of its members might simply be to get a souvenir, but collectively it would grab and rend.

  A young man with a portable microphone was describing the scene. His rapid, hysterical voice was like that of a revivalist preacher whipping his congregation toward the ecstasy of fits.

  “What a crowd, folks! What a crowd! There must be ten thousand excited, screaming fans outside Kahn’s Persian tonight. The police can’t hold them. Here, listen to them roar.”

  He held the microphone out and those near it obligingly roared for him.

  “Did you hear it? It’s a bedlam, folks. A veritable bedlam! What excitement! Of all the premieres I’ve attended, this is the most…the most…stupendous, folks. Can the police hold them? Can they? It doesn’t look so, folks…”

  Another squad of police came charging up. The sergeant pleaded with the announcer to stand further back so the people couldn’t hear him His men threw themselves at the crowd. It allowed itself to be hustled and shoved out of habit and because it lacked an objective. It tolerated the police, just as a bull elephant does when he allows a small boy to drive him with a light stick.

  Tod could see very few people who looked tough, nor could he see any working men. The crowd was made up of the lower middle classes, every other person one of his torchbearers.

  Just as he came near the end of the lane, it closed in front of him with a heave, and he had to fight his way through. Someone knocked his hat off and when he stooped to pick it up, someone kicked him. He whirled around angrily and found himself surrounded by people who were laughing at him. He knew enough to laugh with them. The crowd became sympathetic. A stout woman slapped him on the back, while a man handed him his hat, first brushing it carefully with his sleeve. Still another man shouted for a way to be cleared.

  By a great deal of pushing and squirming, always trying to look as though he were enjoying himself, Tod finally managed to break into the open. After rearranging his clothes, he went over to a parking lot and sat down on the retaining wall that ran along the front of it.

  New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked difficult, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.

  All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

  Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.

  Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

  Tod stood up. During the ten minutes he had been sitting on the wall, the crowd had grown thirty feet and he was afraid that his escape might be cut off if he loitered much longer. He crossed to the other side of the street and started back.

  He was trying to figure what to do if he were unable to wake Homer when, suddenly he saw his head bobbing above the crowd. He hurried toward him. From his appearance, it was evident that there was something definitely wrong.

  Homer walked more than ever like a badly made automaton and his features were set in a rigid, mechanical grin. He had his trousers on over his nightgown and part of it hung out of his open fly. In both of his hands were suitcases. With each step, he lurched to one side then the other, using the suitcases for balance weights.

  Tod stopped directly in front of him, blocking his way. “Where’re you going?”

  “Wayneville,” he
replied, using an extraordinary amount of jaw movement to get out this single word.

  “That’s fine. But you can’t walk to the station from here. It’s in Los Angeles.”

  Homer tried to get around him, but he caught his arm. “We’ll get a taxi. I’ll go with you.”

  The cabs were all being routed around the block because of the preview. He explained this to Homer and tried to get him to walk to the corner.

  “Come on, we’re sure to get one on the next street.”