by John Sanford
[Pictures of war: Lincoln in Little Mac’s tent at the Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, and behind him, on a flag-covered table, his stovepipe; twelve cannoneers around a ten-inch smoothbore on the stern deck of the Miami; a big-nosed eight-wheeler of the U. S. Military R. R.; soldiers resting near stacked carbines; soldiers dying, but not yet fallen down; soldiers dead, and fat in death, at such places as Murfreesboro and Chancellorsville, at Seven Pines and Antietam, and at the one with the name that would be among the last names to live with the mind—Chickamauga.]
* * *
“What books did you borrow today?” the woman said.
“Books about battles,” the boy said.
“Battles in the Revolution?”
“No, not battles in the Revolution.”
“The War of 1812? The Mexican War?” The boy shook his head.
“No,” he said. “The Spanish-American War, then?”
“I don’t like any of those battles. I like the ones with the names!”
“What names do you mean?” the woman said.
“The names you read to me. You know.”
“Don’t you remember them?”
“I’ll always remember them.”
“Then why don’t you say them?”
“I don’t like to.”
“Why not, son?”
“I like to hear them.”
“The Wilderness,” the woman said, and the boy stood very still. “Spotsylvania Court House,” she said, and she watched him fill his lungs and hold them full. And then, almost whispering it, she said, “Chickamauga.”
Vaccinations
A bench near the sea-wall in Battery Park held the hack-driver and his son. They had spent much of the morning in the green glassed-in gloom of the Aquarium, and the boy was tired, and now and again his eyes wobbled to a close and shut out sight of the bright and wind-broken water of the Bay, and once, as he dozed, his father leaned over and kissed his sun-struck hair.
On another bench a short way up the walk sat a gray-haired man, and before him, with his hands on his hips, stood a boy in a sailor-suit. “Tell me your name,” the man was saying. “I don’t want to tell you my name,” the boy said. “Why not?” “I don’t know you.”
“If you tell me your name, and I tell you mine, we’ll know each other.”
“I don’t want to know each other.”
“How about shaking hands, then?”
“I don’t want to shake hands.”
(“That’s a mean boy,” Danny said.)
“Suit yourself,” the man said, and taking a paper bag from his pocket, he untwisted its neck and offered an assortment of candy to the boy.
“I don’t have to suit myself,” the boy said.
The man reached into the bag and brought out a jawbreaker striped like an Italian flag. “Here’s a jim-dandy,” he said.
“I don’t like jim-dandies,” the boy said.
(“He’s terrible mean,” Danny said.)
The man exhibited another selection: a piece of taffy with a peanut-butter heart. “They call this a Mary Jane,” he said.
(“I love Mary Janes,” Danny said.)
“Mary Janes stink,” the boy said.
“You’re hard to please,” the man said, and he dumped a gush of penny-candy into his lap: jujubes, chocolate buds, marshmallow bananas, and wax-gum. “Take your pick.”
“I don’t want to take my pick,” the boy said. “I don’t like you. I hate you.”
The man’s smile suddenly shrank. Grasping a handful of candy and holding it overhead, he said, “Get the hell out of here, you stuckup little pissabed!”
The boy retreated, and from a safe distance, he raised the pistol of his fist, took aim, and fired. “Oink!” he said as loudly as the letters allowed, and then he ran away.
The man let his hand fall and relax, and over the walk rolled a motley of candy. He stared at it, and he sat staring until three pairs of shoes stopped before him, one belonging to the boy, another to a woman, and the third to The Law.
(“A pleeceman!” Danny said.)
“Is this the guy, kiddo?” the policeman said.
“That’s him,” the boy said.
“Mister,” the policeman said, “what did you do to this kid?”
“I did nothing to him,” the man said.
“His governess reported you was molesting him.”
“That’s nonsense. I simply offered him some candy. He didn’t want any, and he ran off.”
“That cheap stuff would’ve spoiled his stomach,” the governess said.
“Get up when a lady’s talking,” the policeman said. The man rose, treading pellets of candy. “So just because he didn’t want none of that junk, you went and molested him.”
“I just finished saying that I did not molest him.”
“Then maybe you tried to entice him.”
“You’re going a little too far, officer.”
“Well, you must’ve did something!”
The governess said, “He called the boy a foul name.”
“I did no such thing,” the man said.
“You did too call me a foul name!” the boy said. “You called me a pissabed!”
“The idea!” the governess said.
“It was a good idea,” the hack-driver said. “I saw the whole thing, and the kid deserved it. He’s a stinker from Stinkville.”
“How dare you!” the governess said.
“Ah, go back uptown where you belong,” the hack-driver said.
The policeman said, “Well, move along.”
After the three pairs of shoes had gone, the gray-haired man approached the hack-driver’s bench, saying, “I have you to thank for.…”
“The next time I see you in this park,” the hack-driver said, “I’m going to break your God damn ass!”
The man turned and walked quickly away.
“You said a foul word,” Danny said. “You could be arrested.”
“He’s a foul guy.”
“What did he do that was foul?”
“There goes a fire-boat,” the hack-driver said. “Those shiny things are where the water comes out when they’re fighting a fire.”
“Why’re you going to break his ass?” Danny said.
“He’s bad, that’s why. When a strange man tries to give a boy candy, it’s a bad thing.”
“But why?”
“It just is,” the hack-driver said.
Self-Control
Even when first built, in 1870, Public School 10A, a four-story brick and brownstone, had worn a look of alarm, but now, long since flanked by taller buildings, the expression was one of horror, as if imperceptibly through the years its neighbors had expanded, and the day were at last foreseeable when they would compress and belittle it to a gasket of talc between them.
Polly Johnson and Danny had paused before it at the curb, and the boy watched other children converge on the doorway at a pace that slackened as confinement loomed. They postponed entering in many and violent ways: by lingering to hammer one more dent in the railing along the wall, by doing balancing-acts with lunch-boxes and books, by making sudden lunges at nothing visible, like bugs, or simply by halting near the gutter and trying for distance with spit. Within, a bell rang.
On either side of the hallway, there were cases of varnished golden oak, holding displays of wampum and pottery, sprays of labeled and long-dead leaves, specimens of child-art, and illuminated mottoes now fungose with dust. The Principal’s office was at the end of the corridor, and Polly Johnson, hand-in-hand with her son, walked toward it through school-sound: chalk on blackboards, singsong rote and giggling, desks banging, and, from somewhere above, a harmonica giving a key.
“You’re a week late with your boy, Mrs. Johnson,” the Principal said, and looking beyond her, he studied a sepia engraving of the purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch.
“He had a cold, Dr. Delahaye,” the woman said, “but a week isn’t very long, and I’m sure he can make up the wo
rk.”
The Principal leaned forward a little, peering at the familiar picture as if it had revealed some new detail. “What work?” he said.
“The work he missed by being sick.”
The Principal eyed the woman for a moment, and then he smiled. “He hasn’t missed any work,” he said. “But will he ever be able to make up the lost play?”
[There were sand-boxes on the floor, and the sand was strewn with tin shells, and buckets, and tiny spades; there were trains, and tracks for trains, and there were trays of modeling-clay, gray and green and rust and blue; there were slates on easels, and rainbows of chalk; there were armies—soldiers, cannon, horses—of painted lead; there were orange fish in a submarine forest, and a yellow bird sang from a bamboo cage; there was a plaster bust of Washington, and there was an American flag, and there was a teacher—and the teacher was Miss Morey, Miss Morey!]
Danny stood motionless and marveling in a vast toyshop without price-tags, and he reached with his eyes for all things in motion and all things at jumbled rest. On the floor around his left shoe, a pool of pale amber water grew.
Family Background
Supper-smells, sucked under the kitchen door, swirled about Danny and drifted past him through the open windows of the parlor, and he watched lights come on as the sky above the courtyard petered out. Clotheslines were fractures in the saffron afterglow, and telephone-poles were papal crosses against calcimined brick. A cat’s head-lamps moved along the main street of a fence, a sink drank and gargled, a child coughed, and, somewhere, a feeble doorbell twittered.
[A woman sitting near an unlit window across the way had long been listening for a different bell: a bell on a box fixed to the molding at the floor; a bell that, ringing, would bring her to her feet and take her to the vulcanized-rubber connections of a wall-telephone. The instrument—bell-box, receiver, and transmitter—had been installed three years before. Never yet had it been used.]
In one of the areas below Danny, a boy was tugging at a kite-cord snagged on a fire-escape. From a packing-case in the adjoining area, another boy watched him, wielding a clothespin as if it were a cigar. He exhaled no-smoke and tapped off no-ash, and then he said, “My name is Waldo Fitch, and I’m smoking to spoil my wind.”
The other boy bent a double wind of cord around his palm and yanked hard; the cord snapped. Considering the shank dangling overhead and then the loops still binding his hand, he made a deduction. “It must’ve broke,” he said, and now, climbing a swaybacked sawhorse, he transferred his attention to Waldo. “My name is Ralph Cooke, and you’re blowing smoke in our yard!”
“I’m eleven, going on twelve,” Waldo said, and he flourished his wooden weed. “Watch me stunt my growth.”
“I’m thirteen, going on fourteen,” Ralph said, “and you’re a crap-head.”
[The air, the earth, and the sea were filled with wire, in single strands, in mats and meshes, in carpets and twisted ropes, and nations were lashed down and continents shackled with it, all to make a room in a flat in a downtown tenement accessible to any voice in any language at any time, but no mouth had ever fashioned the twelve-letter three-digit combination of Bowling Green 757.]
“There’s a fighter name of Leach Cross, and he’s a dentist,” Waldo said. “He fixes my father’s teeth in Harlem, and when I go along, he shows me all the punches, so if you call me a crap-head again, I’ll hit you in the solo plexus.”
Ralph appraised the younger boy, and then he said, “If you wasn’t such a kid, I’d knock you down and cockalize you.”
“You and what army?” Waldo said.
“But taking avantage of a kid is a sin, and when you’re thirteen years of old, you get held responcivil.”
“Why do you have to be thirteen years of old?”
“Because any younger, you’re still a kid. It stands to reason.”
“Kids can make sins,” Waldo said. “I’m sinning right now with all this smoking and rooning my health.”
“There’s two kinds of people can’t sin—kids and loonies.”
“Who told you about the loonies?”
“I found out by myself,” Ralph said. He produced a stick of chalk that almost at once became a rival of Waldo’s cigar: a cigarette. “I happen to know a loony lady.”
[There were other objects in the room—an iron bedstead, a chair, a small table, a gas-range encrusted with boiled-over meals, a few pieces of crockery, and a mirror blotched where its backing of mercury had peeled—but they were things accepted without thought and almost an assumption, like air, and, in use or idle, they in no way arrested the mind. But the virgin telephone (Bowling Green 757) came at the woman like a train running toward her in a dream]
Wonderment wrinkled Waldo’s mouth as if he were about to kiss with it, and when he spoke, it was with awe and entreaty. “A loony lady!” he said. “What does she do? Tell me, Ralphie! What does she do?”
Ralph fitted an imaginary holder to his imaginary cigarette and squinted down an infinite slope of disdain. “What’s it worth to you?” he said.
Reverence tottered and collapsed. “Worth!” Waldo said. “Why, I wouldn’t even pay you in bottle-caps!”
“Then you can go fish,” Ralph said.
“Then you never seen any loony lady.”
“Say that again, and I’ll mobilize you.”
“Mobilize, cockalize—and I’m still smoking a cigar,” Waldo said. “I’ll make a bargain: you tell me about the loony lady, and you get five puffs.”
“All right,” Ralph said. “What do you want to know?”
“First off, what does she look like?”
“Like a lady. What do you think?”
“She ought to phone at the mouth. Otherwise, how can you tell she’s loony?”
“Well, for instant, she stands around all the time looking in the mirrow.”
“So do I stand around looking in the mirrow.”
“But she makes faces at herself,” Ralph said.
“Who can’t?” Waldo said, and he inhaled his cheeks, and his features shrank as if painted on a punctured balloon. “There’s got to be something else beside making faces.”
[Who was she, and what was her name, her weight, her height, her complexion? How old was she, where were her parents, if living, who were her friends, and did she have a husband, a lover, or only some guy named Arthur brought in out of the rain? Was she stout, skinny, strung out, or dumpy, and what was the exact color of her eyes, her flesh, her politics, and her liver? Did she wear false teeth, transformations, corn-pads, and other jewelry, and were there flakes of dandruff on her shirtwaist, sweat-stains on her shields, hard black hairs in wens on her chin or nose? How much money did she have in the bank, under a floorboard, in a coffee-can, in the toe of a sock? Did she believe that Christ was God’s only begotten son, or did she worship different and less respectable plaster-casts? Was her heart in the right place or on the right side? Was she afraid of dark rooms, heights, crowds, and hell? What foods did she favor, and were dogs friendly to her flavor and her outstretched hand? Who was she, and what was her name, and who knew she was alive and, knowing it, would spend a nickel to say, “Bowling Green 757? What hath God wrought?”]
“It’s about time I got a couple of puffs,” Ralph said.
“Nothing doing,” Waldo said. “We made a bargain.”
“You sure want your powder flesh.”
“I only want all I got coming to me.”
“You could see it for yourself, if you wanted, but first you got to pay off.”
“You show me the loony lady,” Waldo said, “or I break the contrack!”
Ralph drew deeply on the chalk cigarette to deaden his anger, and emitting smoke in such volume that he had to fan it away, he pointed his chin across the yard. “That’s her window,” he said. “The one next to the fire-excape.”
“But it’s dark!” Waldo said.
“What do you want me to do—go up and lighten the light?”
Waldo manufactured an o
utsize sneer, a distortion so vast that it altered his voice. “You never seen a loony lady in your whole life!” he said. “You just made up all that stuff so’s you could weasel me out of my clear Havana cigar! But you got stung, because the contrack is busted!”
Ralph pitched a fist that hit Waldo flush on the nose. The boy clapped both hands to his face and sank from sight, baying like a dog. Peering over the fence after him, Ralph said, “Leach Cross!”
[The woman rose from her chair at the dark window next to the fire-escape, and, putting on a hat, she went downstairs to the street. At the corner, there was a drug-store; in the drug-store, there was a booth; in the booth, there was a telephone. Fitting her ear and mouth to the apparatus, she said when spoken to, “Bowling Green 757”—and then she listened for what only others could hear.]
Through the dark window next to the fire-escape came the sound of a bell. It rang seven times, and then it was still, and in the area below, as its last after sound died away, Ralph Cooke began to make a drawing on the fence. His chalk cigarette was merely chalk now.
Polly Johnson came from the kitchen, struck a match, and made gaslight for the parlor. “You’d better wash your hands, Danny,” she said. “It’s almost time for supper.” The boy said nothing as he went to the sink, opened a tap, and watched water pool in his palms and leak away. As the woman spread a cloth on the table, she said, “Why do you always stare at that window over there?”
“What window?” the boy said.
“The one across the yard. Is it because you think the woman is crazy?”
“I don’t know.”
“She really isn’t. She’s just lonely.”
“I look and look,” the boy said, “but I don’t know why.”
Scars, Birthmarks, Etc.
The hack-driver entered the flat, tossed his cap at the hatrack like a quoit, and headed for the kitchen, saying, “What’s to eat?” The way was blocked by his son, who stood before him drying his hands on a dish-towel; on the boy’s cheek ran several ragged scratches, and his left eye was a slit between two purple puffs. “Holy Smoke!” the hack-driver said. “What happened to your queer little puss?”
