Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  O’Malley walked slowly from east to west on the rolling footpaths of the park, free now of nurses and children and policemen and scholars and old men retired heartbrokenly from business. The paths were free now of everything but the soft night and the mist and the country smell of spring earth and the endless and complex memory of all the feet that had trod and worn the paths in the green park in the palm of the city’s hand.

  O’Malley walked slowly, carrying his head with the exaggerated and conscious care of a man who feels he has drunk one whisky past absolute clarity. He breathed deeply of that rare and fragrant early morning air which seemed to O’Malley to have been made especially by God, in assurance of His mercy and benign tolerance, to follow whisky.

  O’Malley looked around him at the city slumbering magnificently past the trees of the park and was glad to know his home was there, his work, his future. He walked slowly from eat to west, breathing in the quiet air, holding his head carefully, but comfortably.

  “Pardon me.” A man slipped out in front of him. “Have you got a light?”

  O’Malley stopped and struck a match. He held the match to the man’s cigarette, noticing the touch of rouge on the cheeks, the long, carefully waved hair, the white trembling hands cupping the match, the slight smear of rouge on the man’s lips.

  “Thanks.” The man lifted his head, looked sidewise, but challengingly, at O’Malley. O’Malley put the matches away and started to move westward, holding his head in gentle balance.

  “Lovely night,” said the man hurriedly. His voice was shrill and girlish and came from high in his throat, all breath, nervous, almost hysterical. “I adore walking in the park at this time on a night like this. Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe the air.”

  O’Malley breathed the air.

  “All alone?” the man asked nervously.

  “Uhuh,” O’Malley said.

  “You’re not lonesome?” The man’s hands pulled at each other as he talked. “You’re not afraid to walk all alone through the park at this hour?”

  “No,” O’Malley said, ready, with the drinks and the sweetness of the air, and the feeling of living in and, in a way, owning the great city of New York, to pass on a kind word to every living thing. “I never get lonesome and I like to walk through the park when it’s empty and dark like this.”

  The man nodded unhappily. “Are you sure you don’t want company?” he asked desperately, looking up at O’Malley with that sidewise and challenging look, like the look of a frightened but determined woman at a man she has decided to catch.

  “I’m sure,” O’Malley said gently. “I’m sorry.” And he left the man with the carefully waved hair standing next to a tree with the little light of the cigarette gleaming in his hand and walked slowly on. He walked on, feeling sorry for the man, feeling good that he had enough of a fund of sympathy and human feeling so that he could sorrow, even slightly, over a man like that, rouged and roaming the park on a sinful and illicit errand, met for sixty seconds in the middle of the night.

  “Say, Buddy,” another man, small, and even in the darkness, knobby and gnarled, stepped out from behind a tree. “I want a dime.”

  O’Malley dug dreamily in his pocket. There was nothing there. “I haven’t got a dime,” he said.

  “I want a dime,” the man said. O’Malley saw that his face was dark and savage-looking, not a city face, grimy, hard, gleaming in the light of a distant lamppost. The clothes the man wore were too large and improvised and torn, and he continually lifted his arms to slide the sleeves back from his wrist, giving him a supplicant and religious look.

  “I told you I haven’t got a dime,” O’Malley said.

  “Gimme a dime!” the little man said loudly. His voice was rough and hoarse, as though he had been shouting in noisy places for years on end.

  O’Malley took out his wallet and opened it and showed it to the man. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “Look.”

  The man looked. He lifted his arms to free his wrists from his sleeves, looked uneasily over O’Malley’s shoulder up at the lamppost. O’Malley put his wallet away.

  “Gimme a dollar,” the man said.

  “I showed you my wallet,” O’Malley said. “I haven’t got a dollar. I haven’t got anything. I’m busted.”

  The man walked thoughtfully around O’Malley, walking lightly, on his toes, as though he expected to take O’Malley by surprise. “I’ll beat you up,” he said. “No matter how big you are. I’m a prizefighter. I’m an Indian. I’m a Creek Indian. My name’s Billy Elk. Gimme a dime!” He put out his hand as though he was absolutely confident now that he’d convinced O’Malley and the money would be dropped in his hand.

  “I’m busted,” O’Malley said. “Honest.”

  Billy Elk circled O’Malley slowly, his large and ragged garments flapping around him. O’Malley stood there, gently willing, in the fragrance and loneliness and peace of the night, to befriend a penniless Creek Indian prizefighter astray far from home in Central Park.

  Billy Elk’s face creased in thought as he tip-toed around O’Malley. “Give me the wallet,” he said suddenly. “I can get a dollar for that.”

  “It only cost seventy-five cents,” O’Malley said.

  Billy Elk’s face creased in thought again. Only half-consciously now, he walked lightly in a circle around O’Malley, who stood there dreamily, looking up at the towers of the city rearing dark and magnificent against the clear soft sky, with here and there the scattered lights, lust and illness, keeping the city from total sleep in the depths of the night.

  Suddenly Billy Elk leaped at him, snatched from his outside breast pocket the fountain pen O’Malley carried there. Billy Elk covered it proudly and lovingly in his gnarled hands, half-bent over it, his dark and savage face lit now by wild satisfaction. “I can get a dollar for this,” he said.

  “It only cost twenty-five cents,” O’Malley said gently. “In the five and ten.”

  Billy Elk considered the pen in his hands. “All right,” he said. “I can get twenty-five.”

  “Who’ll give you twenty-five?” O’Malley asked.

  Billy Elk backed up three steps to think about this. He sighed, came up to O’Malley and gave him the pen. O’Malley put the pen in his pocket, smiled in a pleasant, brotherly way at the Indian.

  “Give me a dollar!” Billy Elk said harshly.

  O’Malley smiled again and patted him on the shoulder. “Good night,” he said, and started slowly home.

  “If you don’t give me the dollar,” Billy Elk shouted, keeping pace with him, talking up at him, “I’ll report you to the police.”

  O’Malley stopped. “For what?” he asked, smiling dreamily, pleased that the city and the night had produced, after the one Scotch too many, this wild and tiny creature.

  “For talking to a fairy,” Billy Elk shouted. “I saw you!”

  “What did you see?” O’Malley asked mildly.

  “I saw you with that fairy,” Billy Elk said. “I’ll take you to a policeman. Don’t try to get away. I’m a prizefighter. Keep your hands in your pockets!”

  “Take me to a policeman,” O’Malley said, feeling somehow that it was his duty, as one of the few citizens of the city awake and moving, to be pleasant, hospitable, at the service of visitors, beggars, lunatics, lost children and young girls fled from home.

  They walked out of the park in silence. Billy Elk’s face was cast in harsh, savage lines, his eyes glittered, his mouth was set. At a corner on Central Park West, a fat policeman was wearily talking to a cab driver slouched in his seat. All the weight of the night hung over them, the deaths in the hospitals, the pain endured, the crimes committed in the dark hours, the hearts broken and the torture of men betrayed by women while the city slept, distilled and poured down in the bleak lamplight over the officer of the law and the tired man at the wheel of the old cab under the lamppost.

  O’Malley stopped ten yards away and Billy Elk strode up to the policeman, who was lamenting the fact that
his wife had kidney trouble and that his daughter was free with the boys, although she was only in the third term of high school.

  The policeman stopped talking when Billy Elk stopped in front of him, and looked at the Indian slowly, mournfully, expecting only trouble, the night’s everlasting gift to him.

  “Well?” he asked Billy Elk sadly.

  Billy Elk looked fleetingly and wildly over his shoulder at O’Malley, then turned back to the policeman. “Is there an Indian Reservation around here?” he asked loudly.

  The policeman, grateful that no murder had turned up, no entry, rape, arson, assault, double-parking committed, thought seriously for a full minute. “No,” he said. “I don’t know of any Indian Reservation in these parts.”

  “There’s a place called Indian Point,” said the cab driver. “It’s up the river.”

  Billy Elk nodded soberly, with ancient dignity, came back to O’Malley and the policeman went on to tell the cab driver that although his daughter was merely sixteen years old she was built in all respects like a full-blooded woman of thirty.

  Billy Elk stood in front of O’Malley and smiled, his face suddenly broken by the flash of teeth and gleam of eye into warm childishness. “See,” he said. “I’m not such a bad guy.”

  He waved and departed into the park, slipping silently and expertly among the trees, like Tecumseh’s braves and the slippery, valiant red defenders of Kentucky’s bloody ground.

  O’Malley walked slowly home, breathing deeply the clear morning air, pleased to be in a city in which Indians roamed the streets and went to great lengths to prove their friendliness and goodness of heart.

  Material Witness

  Lester Barnum walked down the steps, across the street and around the corner without looking back. He was a small, worn-out, neat, married-looking man, walking slowly, as though he never got enough sleep, his head lowered politely and humbly into his gray overcoat, his gray face pursed vaguely and undramatically over some inner problem.

  A year in jail, he thought. He shook his head and turned to look at the huge gray prison that had held him, but he had gone around the corner without realizing it, and the jail and the year were behind him and out of sight. He walked aimlessly on, looking without real interest at the free men about him.

  He hadn’t liked the men he’d met in prison. In the movies, cellblocks were invariably inhabited by warm, great-hearted, harmless persons, but in the year he had spent behind bars no convicts of that particular type had turned up. There had only been rough, large, desperate men who had put pepper in his coffee, nails in his bed, and occasionally, in moments of extreme emotion, had hit him with mop-handles and slop buckets. And there was always a small, pasty-faced man turning up every month or so, whispering gratingly into his ear in the exercise yard, “Talk an’ the next stop is Woodlawn. Fer yer own good …”

  Everybody took it for granted that he owned some secret, deadly information—the police, the district attorney, the convicts. Barnum sighed as he walked listlessly along the bustling, free streets. He stopped irresolutely at a corner. No direction was more inviting than any other direction, no street offered any final destination. There was no home for him to go to. For the first time in his forty-three years there was no definite, appointed place where his clothes were hanging, his bed ready to be slept in. His wife had gone to St. Louis with an automobile mechanic and had taken his two daughters with her. “I might as well tell you,” she’d said flatly in the visiting room at the jail after he’d been there three months. “This has been going on a long time, but now he’s going to St. Louis and I guess it’s about time you found out.” And she’d pulled at one of the curly little hats she was always wearing and adjusted her corset a little angrily as though Barnum had insulted her and she’d started west. And he’d found out that the printing shop he’d worked in for seventeen years had been unionized and his job had been taken over, at a much higher salary, by a Rumanian with a beard.

  Barnum whistled bleakly through his teeth, thinking vaguely of the years behind him when he had led an ordinary, simple existence, bringing home the comic papers to his children every evening, dozing after dinner while his wife complained of one thing and another, a plain, unnoticed, uncomplicated life, in which he never talked to such important, improbable persons as district attorneys and Irish detectives, never had pepper put in his coffee by exasperated swindlers and dope-peddlers.

  It had all started because he’d turned down Columbus Avenue, instead of Broadway. A year ago he had been walking slowly and quietly home from work, worrying over the fact that the Boss had marched back and forth behind him in the shop all afternoon, muttering, “I can’t stand it! There are limits! I can’t stand it!” Barnum hadn’t known what it was that the Boss couldn’t stand, but, vaguely, it had worried him, as there was always the possibility that the thing that the Boss couldn’t stand might be Barnum. But he had been walking wearily home, knowing there would be haddock for dinner and that he would have to mind the children that evening because his wife was going to some woman’s club where, she said, instruction was to be had in knitting.

  Dimly Barnum had felt the evening was not going to be pleasant—dull, aimless, like thousands of other evenings in his life.

  Then it had happened. A tall, very dark man had walked swiftly past Barnum, holding his hands in his pockets. Suddenly another man, in a gray hat and topcoat, had leaped out of a doorway and tapped the tall dark man on the shoulder. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” the man in the gray hat had said loudly and the dark man had started to run and the man in the gray hat had pulled a gun from under his armpit and yelled, “Not this time, Spanish!” and shot the dark man four times. The dark man slid quietly to the pavement and the man in the gray coat said, “How do you like that?” and looked once, coldly, at Barnum, who was standing there, with his mouth open. “Aah!” the man in the gray coat said loudly, pulling up one corner of his mouth in a snarl—and then he’d disappeared.

  Barnum just stood there looking at the tall dark man who was lying quietly on the sidewalk, looking not so tall now, with the blood coming from him. After a while Barnum closed his mouth. He moved dreamily over to the man lying on the sidewalk. The man’s eyes looked up at Barnum, calmly dead.

  “Say—say, Mister! What happened?” A man in a butcher’s apron was standing next to Barnum, looking down excitedly.

  “I saw it,” Barnum said slowly. “This fellow walked past me and a man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway and he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ and then he said, ‘Not this time, Spanish’ and he went bang! bang! bang! bang! and he said ‘How do you like that?’ and he looked at me and he went ‘Aaah!’ and he disappeared and this gentleman was dead.”

  “What happened?” A fat lady ran across the street from a millinery shop, shouting as she ran.

  “A man’s been shot,” the butcher said. “He saw it.” He pointed at Barnum.

  “How did it happen?” the milliner asked, respectfully. Three more men had run up by this time, and four small boys, all looking at the corpse.

  “Well,” Barnum said, feeling important as the babel of talk died down as he began to speak, “I was walking along and this fellow walked past me and a man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway and he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ and this fellow started to run and the man in the gray hat pulled out a gun and he said, ‘Not this time, Spanish’ and he went bang! bang! bang! bang!” Barnum shouted the bangs and pointed his finger violently at the corpse on the sidewalk. “And he said, ‘How do you like that?’ and he looked at me and he went ‘Aaah!’” Barnum curled his lip into an imitation of the murderer’s snarl. “And he disappeared and this gentleman was dead.”

  By now there were fifty people gathered around Barnum and the corpse. “What happened?” the latest arrival asked.

  “I was walking along,” Barnum said in a loud voice, conscious of every eye upon him, “and this fellow walked past me.…”

  “Lissen, Bu
ddy.” A small rough-looking man nudged his elbow. “Why don’t you go home? You didn’t see nuthin’.”

  “I saw,” Barnum said excitedly. “I saw with my own eyes. A man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway …” Barnum leaped to demonstrate, the crowd respectfully falling back to give him room, as Barnum landed catlike, his knees bent but tense. “And he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ And this fellow”—with a wave for the corpse—“started to run …” Barnum took two quick little steps to show how the dead man had started to run “… and the man in the gray hat pulled out a gun and said …”

  “Why don’t you go home?” the rough little man said pleadingly. “It’s nuthin’ to me, but you’re only complicating yerself. Why don’t you go home?”

  Barnum looked at him coldly for a moment.

  “Then what happened?” a voice demanded from the crowd.

  “‘Not this time, Spanish!’” Barnum cried. “And he went bang! bang! bang! bang!” Barnum moved his hand as though he was firing a heavy gun and fighting the recoil. “And he said, ‘How do you like that?’ and he looked at me and he went ‘Aaah!’” Barnum snarled it out, with every eye upon him, “and he disappeared, and this gentleman was dead.”

  “As a good friend of yours,” the small rough man said earnestly, “I advise you to go home. You didn’t see nuthin’.…”

  “What happened?” A voice shouted across the bobbing heads. By now it seemed to Barnum nearly a thousand people must be congregated around him, all with their eyes fixed eagerly on him, who never, even in his own home, could get three people at one time, even his wife and two children, to listen to him for as long as a minute without interruption.

  “I was walking along,” Barnum said in a loud, ringing voice, “and this fellow …”

  “Mistuh!” The small man shook his head despairingly. “Why’re you doing this? What’s it goin’ to get you? Trouble!”