by John Sanford
“I got in a fight at school,” the boy said.
“Ah, a pugilist! Tell us all about it—how it started and who finally carried the other kid away.”
“I had a pretty thing that I made in school, and I was bringing it home to show Mom, and I was walking along amiring it, and we bumped shoulders—a boy that’s in my class—and the thing fell down in the street and got spoiled.”
“So far, it’s all in your favor. Who made the next move?”
“He did. He said why didn’t I look where I was going.”
“And you?”
“I said why didn’t he look where he was going.” “And him?”
“He said, ‘Oh, a hard guy!’”
“And you?”
“I said, ‘From Hardville,’ like you told me.”
“We’re off!” the hack-driver said. “What happened now?”
“He said for me to get out of his way or he’d spit in my eye.”
“Did you dare him?”
“I triple-dared him.”
“What did he do?”
“He spit in my eye.”
“Why, the dirty son-of-a … !”
“Daniel!” Polly Johnson said.
“So he spit in your eye!” the hack-driver said.
“He spit in both eyes,” the boy said.
“The hell, he did! What did you do?”
“I spit back.”
“That’s more like it.”
“But I missed,” the boy said. “I didn’t have enough spit.”
The hack-driver sat down and rocked himself. “Well, get on with it,” he said. “You didn’t grow them welts from being spit on.”
“He stepped on the thing that I made, and it got all crushed.”
“And then you hit him?”
“No,” the boy said.
“You didn’t hit him for spitting in your eye, and you didn’t hit him for stepping on the thing. What did you do, for Chrisake?”
“I picked up the thing that I made, and it was all crushed.”
“We covered that,” the hack-driver said. “But what did you do? What did you say?”
“I said, ‘You crushed my thing.’”
“Hooray for you! Is that all you could think of?”
“That’s all,” the boy said.
“Well, then, what did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything. He said something, though. He said, ‘Get outa my way, or I’ll do the same to you as I done to the thing.’”
“Now, of course, you hit him.”
“No,” the boy said.
“Would you please tell me why not?”
“Because he hit me.”
“But naturally you hit him back.”
“I couldn’t hit him naturally.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t hit him naturally?”
“I was laying on the ground.”
“He knocked you down with one punch?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“Why didn’t you duck, like I showed you?”
“I did duck. That’s how he hit me.”
“Well, you didn’t have to stay on the ground. You could’ve got up.”
“Oh, I got up, all right. I got up in a jiffy.”
“That’s better. And then, finally, you hit him.”
“Nope. He knocked me down again.”
“I’m sick,” the hack-driver said, and he put his head back and glared at the stained ceiling.
“I got up again, though,” Danny said.
The rocker moved a little and stopped again. “And then he hit you a third time, and there you were on the ground, like before,” the hack-driver said.
“No, sir!” the boy said.
The hack-driver sat upright, and once more his rocking was spirited. “Don’t tell me you got around to hitting him!”
“I won’t,” the boy said. “He hit me again, but this time I didn’t fall down.”
The hack-driver groaned. “We’re winning!” he said. “We’re winning!”
“I wasn’t winning,” the boy said. “I was losing.”
“That’s news, I suppose! I know damn well you was losing. You was lost in a cloud of knuckles!”
The boy said, “He hit me a whole lot, in the mouth, in the nose, in the belly, but I never fell down again, not once. I learned how to make him stop knocking me down.”
The hack-driver felt the muscles of his jaw harden and shrink, and his eyeballs stung him, and his nostrils prickled. “Give us a kiss, son,” he said. “Now, tell us the rest of it.”
“He hit me and hit me and hit me, but he couldn’t make me fall down any more.”
“Didn’t you hit him once, Danny-boy? Not even once?”
“I couldn’t tell. I was crying.”
“Crying! What the hell for?”
“He was hurting me.”
“You should’ve hurt him right back.”
“There was one time when I heard him say ‘Ow!’”
“Ah! That shows you hit him a beaut!”
“No, I think he just skinned himself on my head.”
“I guess if your head would’ve stood up, you could’ve skinned him alive.”
“Maybe, but right after that, the man come along and grabbed his arm.”
“The man! What man? And what did he grab his arm for?”
“The boy was going to hit me again, and the man stopped him.”
“He should’ve butted out, the God damn buttinsky! You just made the kid say ‘Ow!’ The tide was turning.”
“He grabbed the boy’s arm and made him open his fist.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t say there was a rock in it!”
“Not a rock, but he had a ring made out of a horseshoe-nail.”
“The mishrable yellow-belly sneak!”
“The man made him take it off.”
“I’d like to meet that man some time,” the hack-driver said. “I owe him a beer.”
“Then the man made us start to fight again.”
“And you was boiling mad, and you knocked the kid on his ass!”
“I was boiling mad, all right, but I didn’t knock him on his ass.”
“You should’ve wiped the street with him!”
“I tried to, but I couldn’t.”
“Why not? You had the right on your side.”
“Maybe, but he was a better fighter.”
The hack-driver said, “Even without the ring?”
“Yes,” the boy said, “even without the ring.”
“Once he quit cutting you to pieces with it, you should’ve sailed in and crowned him.”
“Oh, I only got cut after he took the ring off.”
The hack-driver rose and stamped back and forth across the parlor. “Damn it all to smack!” he said. “When’re one of us Johnsons going to win a fight?”
From the doorway of the kitchen, his wife said, “We’ll win our share, never fear.”
Political Affiliation
Andren Burch, one of the teachers at P.S. 10A, was a sick man. He had a pulse of 74, a blood-pressure of 145, fair vision, clear lungs, good digestion, functioning kidneys, no malignancies, and only the barest trace of sugar, but he was a sick man: he thought of death. He thought of death always, and because he lived as if life were a condemned building, in his fancy he was constantly dropping dead, dying violently in a catastrophe, being incurably infected through a cut or a bruise, wasting away with a phrase (a lingering illness), or merely aging. It was this last form of death that he contemplated most: it was the least preventable.
In a moment, now, he would open a notebook and call his class to order.
There had been many classes, he thought, more than he cared to remember, and there had been many lecture-rooms, many notebooks, and many and varied faces, but all faces had fused into one face that was none he could recognize, and all places and all things had become no place and nothing. He did not see now, as he had seen at the beginning, the blood-burnished skin of the young, the tile-shine
of their teeth, and their fresh eyes that were like limoges. He did not see now, nor would he ever see again, that there were some who came day after day in their one suit and their only pair of shoes, that there were some who ate during the lunch-hour and some who watched and watered at the mouth until the last crumbs were eaten or brushed away. He did not see now the weak and the strong, the dirty and the clean, and the shy and the brash, nor could he any longer distinguish between the agony of ignorance and the composure of knowledge. He did not see that the good outnumbered the evil all the rest to one, and among the forty-two children before him on this day, six across and seven deep, there was none to whom he could turn with love: all were evil.
He had once been only twenty years older than the oldest of his pupils; now the difference between them was doubled: by a subjective and one-sided mathematics, their age had remained constant while his had changed. They had come to him in nonage, and so they had gone away; only he had felt the shifting of the first sand-grain that betokened the avalanche. “I am forty years old,” he had told himself once, and from then had he known that his time was running out. Forty had too soon become forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four—and the first sand-grain had clearly multiplied to more than he could count. And then it had been forty-five, forty-six, and forty-seven, each always for an always-dwindling year, and then forty-eight, and forty-nine, and now fifty—and the fifty was going like the rest. Fifty-one might come, but with tumbling rock, and fifty-two, but with the earth on the move, the whole earth … !
There were death-ornaments in the room. Behind the last row of desks hung a painting of a battle-scene in which a mounted general and his mounted staff viewed the progress of some anonymous and distant slaughter. to the left and right of this were a pair of Audubon prints, one of a turkey-buzzard, the bird with an appetite for death, and the other of a duck-hawk, death itself on the wing. On a shelf opposite the window-wall stood a Lincoln deathmask, a clay replica of clay, and displayed in a frame between the two front blackboards was the best historical essay of the preceding class, its own self-composed epitaph. The author of the last paper chosen for this distinction had returned as a visitor, and unconscious of all but his creation, he was standing below it now and reading its familiar yet ever-fresh lines:
Washington the Man with the
Determine Face
The report come in by messeger. George Washington was alected to the first president of the Untied States. He won by a big majority, so I went to see him. When I got to the house, I met a butler.
He said “Could I see Mr. Washington?”
He said “Who was I?” I said “I was a freind.”
He said “I am sorry to interrup you, but Mr. Washington axpect you.”
I followed the butler in the liberry, and there was a man in a three corner hat with a determine face.
“I persume you are Mr. Daniel Johnson” the elagent man said with the determine face.
I said “Yes I am Mr. Washington” because I knew right away who it was.
He said “Why did you come here in the liberry?”
I said swiftly “I come here in the liberry to congradualate you for being such a good president. Also to quiz your early life. But that is not my business if you will not tell me.”
He said “I was glad to be alected.”
I said “I would like to know about your early life” I quizzed again.
“I was born on 1732” he ansered thinking hard. I quizzed him “When you were born did you have a good education?”
“The best there was” he said “and that is more than I can say for my teacher” he laughed.
I said “Did you think you would be alected?”
“That is a personel question” he ansered smilling.
After I was all done quizzing he said “Would I like to dine with him?”
I ansered swiftly “No I have to get home.”
He said “Then my butler will open the door when you go.”
“Good by Mr. Washington” I called.
“Good by Mr. Johnson” he said gravly.
When the butler opened the door I saw with amazment that he was a slave.
The bell rang.
“You may go now, Johnson,” Burch said, and he turned back the cover of his notebook.
Height, Weight, Reach
From the stringpiece of a Hudson River dock, a quintet of boys watched the passing water-traffic with bulging eyes. The stiff muck of all-day suckers had stifled speech for a time, but little by little tooth and sinew had broken down the almost indestructible candy, and dog-sounds gave way now to words.
Roger Lynch gulped, swallowed, looked enviously at his companions, and said, “I wish I’d’ve bought another one.”
“You shouldn’t’ve et so fast,” Dewey Myers said.
Paul Stagg said, “I chew a all-day sucker till it just dreens down my neck.”
“I wait till I can bend it,” Morton Peck said, “and then I kind of stow it in my gooms. That way, I still got some left tomorrow.”
Daniel Johnson said, “What I do depends on if I’m thinking.”
“What’re you thinking about right this second?” Morton said.
“Right this second, I’m thinking about Nothing.”
“He’s thinking about nothing,” Morton said to the other three and, with an inclusive glance, to certain fancied onlookers.
“Nothing is one of my favorite things to think,” Danny said. “Like at night, when the stars come out.”
“Nothing is nothing, even at night.”
“I mean, in between the stars—that’s where Nothing is.”
“You’re damn right. There’s nothing in the sky for a million-trillion miles.”
“But how about after that?” Danny said.
“That’s as far as nothing goes. That’s the end.”
“If Nothing ends,” Danny said, “Something begins.”
Morton appealed to the huge crowd that had gathered to hear the dispute. “When is he going to say something with brains in it?” he said.
“I always say things with brains.”
“On my opinion, you’re a peanut-head.”
“I’m not suppose to use bad language,” Danny said, “but if you call me that again, I will have to break your ass.”
“Listen,” Morton said. “I seen Red Nolan make it come right out of your ears.”
“That was Red Nolan. That ain’t you.”
“He done it once, and he can done it again.”
“Maybe, but that still ain’t you, Morty.”
“You guys make me sick,” Roger said. “Always fighting.”
“Who ast you to stick your two cents in?” Morton said.
“Nobody. I just stuck ’em in.”
“Well, stuck ’em out again!”
“Why didn’t you get that hard with Danny?”
“I didn’t feel like, that’s why!”
“Ah, let him alone, Morty,” Paul said. “He’s got goggles on.”
“He’s got goggles on because he don’t want to fight,” Morton said. “He wants to stick his two cents in, but he don’t want to take the consenquences. He don’t need goggles. I seen him once when he left ’em home, and he could see as good as anybody.”
“That’s a lie!” Roger said.
Morton looked first at the countless thousands of his audience and then at Roger. “S-a-y t-h-a-t a-g-a-i-n!” he said. “Say what again?”
“That I’m a liar.”
“I never said it in the first place. I only said what you said was a lie.”
“Don’t that make me out a liar?”
“Not particulary,” Roger said.
“That’s different, then,” Morton said.
Roger turned away for a glance at the river. When he turned back, one side of his face bulged like a sack of rocks. His friends studied the tumescence, but it remained fixed. Dewey reached out and touched it with a fingertip, saying, “I thought you said you wished you had another all-day s
ucker.” Roger sign-spoke the impossibility of talk. “I bet if we’d’ve gave you one, you’d’ve et it.”
Roger tried to say something, but with the words came a viscous dribble skeined with color; he sucked back quickly, and it vanished.
“This’d be a good time to see if he’s goosy,” Paul said.
Roger was again vocal. “There goes a transalanic boat!” he said.
“It’s camelflagged!” Dewey said. “That means it’s painted so’s you can’t see it.”
“If you can’t see it,” Morton said, “how do you know it’s there?”
Dewey explained. “You know it’s there because you’re on it, and you know you’re on it because you can’t cross the ocean without a transalanic boat.”
His doubt removed, Morton said, “Oh.”
“That camelflag is wonderful stuff,” Danny said, “but supposing the man that was camelflagging the boat got some of it on his pants.”
“He’d clean it off,” Paul said.
“But what would he clean? He wouldn’t be able to see what he was cleaning.”
“I got it figured out,” Paul said. “If he got the camelflag on his leg, the leg would get invisible, but he could still see the other one, and he would know the invisible leg was right next to it.”
“I never would’ve been able to think that up, Paul,” Danny said. “You’re a pretty good thinker. But what if the guy only had one leg to start with?”
“If I had time, I could figure that out too.”
Roger said, “My cousin has a leg that got shot off in the French Army.”
“Why didn’t he get it shot off in the American?” Morton said.
“Because the American ain’t fighting.”
“Look. The American Army can fight better when it ain’t fighting than the French Army can fight when it is fighting.”
“All I know is, my cousin got so mad when the Huns sunk the Lusitania that he went and enlisted in the French.”
Danny said, “The Lusitania had guns on.” Four faces slowly turned to him. “The Germans said they was going to fire torpedoes on any transalanic boat with guns on. That was fair warning.”
“Fair!” Morton said. “What’s fair about the Huns laying in the bottom of the ocean and firing torpedoes?”
