27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

by Tennessee Williams

BOXER: Yeah. Going back downstairs.

  LANDLADY: God. I hate for people to make a scene like that. Imagine! Holding me responsible for a sick cat. (She sniffles a little.) Mean, ugly, fat. . . . I guess I am. But who isn’t? (She sinks exhaustedly on the bed. The Boxer stands at the window rolling a cigarette.)

  BOXER: He’s gone out back of the house.

  LANDLADY: What’s he doing back there?

  BOXER: Poking around in the alley and calling the cat. (The Little Man calls in the distance: “Nitchevo!")

  LANDLADY: Useless. He’ll never find her. (There is a sudden burst of joyful shouting. The Boxer leans out the window and chuckles. A softer, warmer quality appears in the slanting sunlight. There is distant music.) Now what’s going on?

  BOXER: A celebration.

  LANDLADY: Celebration of what?

  BOXER: (lighting his cigarette and resting a foot on the sill) The old crack-pot with the whiskers has found the cat.

  LANDLADY: Found her? Who did you say?

  BOXER: The old man, your father-in-law.

  LANDLADY: The old man couldn’t have found her! (She gets up languidly and moves to the window.) How could he have found her? The old man’s blind.

  BOXER: Anyhow, he found her. And there they go. (The Landlady gazes wonderingly out the window. The Boxer slips his arm about her waist. The light is golden, the music is faint and tender.)

  LANDLADY: Well, well, well. And so they are leaving together. The funniest pair of lovers! The ghost of a man—and a cat named Nitchevo! I’m glad. . . . Goodbye! (The music sounds louder and triumphant.)

  CURTAIN

  The Long Goodbye

  CHARACTERS

  JOE.

  MYRA.

  MOTHER.

  SILVA.

  BILL.

  FOUR MOVERS.

  The Long Goodbye

  SCENE: Apartment F, third floor south, in a tenement apartment situated in the washed-out middle of a large mid-western American city. Outside the trucks rumble on dull streets and children cry out at their games in the area-ways between walls of dusty-tomato-colored brick. Through the double front windows in the left wall, late afternoon sunlight streams into the shabby room. Beyond the windows is the door to the stair hall, and in the center of the back wall a large door opening on a corridor in the apartment where a telephone stand is located. A door in the right wall leads to a bedroom. The furnishings are disheveled and old as if they had witnessed the sudden withdrawal of twenty-five years of furious, desperate living among them and now awaited only the moving men to cart them away. From the apartment next door comes the sound of a radio broadcasting the baseball game from Sportsman’s Park. Joe, a young man of twenty-three, is sitting at a table by the double windows, brooding over a manuscript. In front of him is a portable typewriter with a page of the manuscript in it, and on the floor beside the table is a shabby valise. Joe wears an undershirt and wash-pants. The noise of the broadcast game annoys him and he slams down the windows, but the sound is as loud as ever. He raises them and goes out the door on the right and slams other windows. The shouting of the radio subsides and Joe comes back in lighting a cigarette, a desperate scowl on his face. Silva, an Italian youth, small, graceful and good-natured, opens the entrance door and comes in. He is about Joe’s age. By way of greeting he grins and then takes of his shirt.

  JOE: Radios, baseball games! That’s why I write nothing but crap!

  SILVA: Still at it?

  JOE: All night and all day.

  SILVA: How come?

  JOE: I had a wild hair. Couldn’t sleep.

  SILVA: (glancing at page in machine) You’re burning the candle at both ends, Kid . . . (He moves from the table across the room.) And in my humble opinion the light ain’t worth it. I thought cha was moving today.

  JOE: I am. (He flops in table-chair and bangs out a line. Then he removes the sheet.) Phone the movers. They oughta been here.

  SILVA: Yeh? Which one?

  JOE: Langan’s Storage.

  SILVA: Storin’ this stuff?

  JOE: Yeh.

  SILVA: What for? Why don’t you sell it?

  JOE: For six bits to the junk man?

  SILVA: Store it you gotta pay storage. Sell it you got a spot a cash to start on.

  JOE: Start on what?

  SILVA: Whatever you’re going to start on.

  JOE: I got a spot a cash. Mother’s insurance. I split it with Myra, we both got a hundred and fifty. Know where I’m going?

  SILVA: No. Where?

  JOE: Rio. Or Buenos Aires. I took Spanish in high school.

  SILVA: So what?

  JOE: I know the language. I oughta get on okay.

  SILVA: Working for Standard Oil?

  JOE: Maybe. Why not? Call the movers.

  SILVA: (going to the phone) You better stay here. Take your money outa the bank and go on the Project.

  JOE: No. I’m not gonna stay here. All of this here is dead for me. The goldfish is dead. I forgot to feed it.

  SILVA: (into the phone) Lindell 0124. . . . Langan’s Storage? This is the Bassett apartment. Why ain’t the movers come yet? . . . Aw! (He hangs up the receiver.) The truck’s on the way. June is a big moving month. I guess they’re kept busy.

  JOE: I shouldn’t have left the bowl setting right here in the sun. It probably cooked the poor bastard.

  SILVA: He stinks. (Silva picks up the bowl.)

  JOE: What uh you do with him?

  SILVA: Dump ‘im into the tawlut.

  JOE: The tawlut’s turned off.

  SILVA: Oh, well. (He goes out the bedroom door.)

  JOE: Why is it that Jesus makes a distinction between the goldfish an’ the sparrow! (He laughs.) There is no respect for dead bodies.

  SILVA: (coming back in) You are losing your social consciousness, Joe. You should say “unless they are rich"! I read about once where a millionaire buried his dead canary in a small golden casket studded with genuine diamonds. I think it presents a beautiful picture. The saffron feathers on the white satin and the millionaire’s tears falling like diamonds in sunlight—maybe a boy’s choir singing! Like death in the movies. Which is always a beautiful thing. Even for an artist I’d say that your hair was too long. A little hip motion you’d pass for a female Imp. Cigarette?

  JOE: Thanks. Christ!

  SILVA: What’s the matter?

  JOE: How does this stuff smell to you? (He gives him a page of the manuscript.)

  SILVA: Hmm. I detect a slight odor of frying bacon.

  JOE: Lousy?

  SILVA: Well, it’s not you at your best. You’d better get on the Project. We’re through with the city guide.

  JOE: What are you going to write next?

  SILVA: God Bless Harry L. Hopkins 999 times. Naw . . . I got a creative assignment. I’m calling it “Ghosts in the Old Court-house.” Days when the slaves were sold there! . . . This is bad. This speech of the girl’s—"I want to get you inside of my body—not just for the time that it takes to make love on a bed between the rattle of ice in the last highball and the rattle the milk-wagons make—”

  JOE: (tearing the page from his hands) I must’ve been nuts.

  SILVA: You must’ve had hot britches!

  JOE: I did. Summer and celibacy aren’t a very good mix. Buenos Aires. . . .

  1ST MOVER: (from the hall outside) Langan’s Storage!

  JOE: (going to the door) Right here. (He opens the door and the four burly Movers crowd in, sweating, shuffling, looking about with quick, casual eyes.) Take out the back stuff first, will yuh, boys?

  1ST MOVER: Sure.

  SILVA: Hot work, huh?

  2ND MOVER: Plenty.

  3RD MOVER: (walking in hastily) “I got a pocketful of dreams!” What time’s it, kid?

  JOE: Four-thirty-five.

  3RD MOVER: We oughta get time an’ a ha’f w’en we finish this job. How’d the ball game come out?

  JOE: Dunno. (He watches them, troubled.)

  2ND MOVER: What’s it to you, Short Horn
? Get busy! (They laugh and go out the rear corridor. Later they are heard knocking down a bed.)

  SILVA: (noting Joe’s gloom) Let’s get out of this place. It’s depressing.

  JOE: I got to look out for the stuff.

  SILVA: Come on get a beer. There’s a twenty-six-ounce-a-dime joint open up on Laclede.

  JOE: Wait a while, Silva.

  SILVA: Okay. (The Movers come through with parts of a bed. Joe watches them, motionless, face set.)

  JOE: That is the bed I was born on.

  SILVA: Jeez! And look how they handle it—just like it was an ordinary bed!

  JOE: Myra was born on that bed, too. (The Movers go out the door.) Mother died on it.

  SILVA: Yeah? She went pretty quick for cancer. Most of ‘em hang on longer an’ suffer a hell of a lot.

  JOE: She killed herself. I found the empty bottle that morning in a waste-basket. It wasn’t the pain, it was the doctor an’ hospital bills that she was scared of. She wanted us to have the insurance.

  SILVA: I didn’t know that.

  JOE: Naw. We kept it a secret—she an’ me an’ the doctor. Myra never found out.

  SILVA: Where is Myra now?

  JOE: Last I heard, in Detroit. I got a card from her. Here.

  SILVA: Picture of the Yacht Club. What’s she doin’—yachting?

  JOE: (gruffly) Naw, I dunno what she’s doin’. How should I know?

  SILVA: She don’t say? (Joe doesn’t answer.) She was a real sweet kid—till all of a sudden she—

  JOE: Yeh. Ev’rything broke up—when Mom died.

  SILVA: (picking up a magazine) Four bit magazines! No wonder you stick up your nose at the Project. Hemingway! You know he’s got a smooth style. (Joe stands as if entranced as the Movers pass through to the rear.) He’s been with the Loyalist forces in Spain. Fighting in front-line trenches, they say. And yet some a the critics say that he wears a toupee on his chest! Reactionaries! (Silva begins to read. Myra comes quietly into the room—young, radiant, vibrant with the glamor that memory gives.)

  JOE: You got a date tonight, Myra?

  MYRA: Uh-huh.

  JOE: Who with?

  MYRA: Bill.

  JOE: Who’s Bill?

  MYRA: Fellow I met at the swimming meet out at Bellerive Country Club.

  JOE: I don’t think a swimming pool’s the best place in the world to pick up your boy-friends, Myra.

  MYRA: Sure it is. If you look good in a Jantzen. (She slips of her kimono.) Get my white summer formal. No, I better. You got sweaty hands. (She goes out the bedroom door.)

  JOE: What happened to Dave and Hugh White and that—that K. City boy?

  MYRA: (coming back with a white evening dress on) Who? Them? My God, I don’t know. Here. Hook this for me.

  JOE: I guess what you’ve got in your heart’s a revolving door.

  MYRA: You know it. The radio’s a great institution, huh, Joe? (rapidly brushing her hair) I get so tired of it. Pop’s got it on all the time. He gripes my soul. Just setting there, setting there, setting there! Never says nothing no more.

  JOE: You oughta watch your English. It’s awful.

  MYRA: Hell, I’m not a book-worm. How’s it look?

  JOE: Smooth. Where you going?

  MYRA: Chase Roof. Bill is no piker. His folks have got lotsa mazooma. They live out in Huntleigh—offa Ladue. Christ, it’s—whew! Open that window! Cloudy?

  JOE: No. Clear as a bell.

  MYRA: That’s good. Dancing under the stars! (The doorbell rings.) That’s him. Get the door. (Joe faces the door as Bill enters.)

  JOE: Why go to Switzerland, huh?

  BILL: What? (He laughs indifferently.) Oh, yeah. She ready?

  JOE: Sit down. She’ll be right out.

  BILL: Good.

  JOE: (sweeping papers off the sofa) You see we read the papers. Keep up with events of the day. Sport sheet?

  BILL: No, thanks.

  JOE: The Cards won a double-header. Joe Medwick hit a home-run with two men on in the second. Comics?

  BILL: No, thanks. I’ve seen the papers.

  JOE: Oh. I thought you might’ve missed ‘em because it’s so early.

  BILL: It’s eight-forty-five.

  JOE: It’s funny, isn’t it?

  BILL: What?

  JOE: The chandelier. I thought you were looking at it.

  BILL: I hadn’t noticed—particularly.

  JOE: It always reminds me a little of mushroom soup. (Bill regards him without amusement.) Myra says that you live in Huntleigh Village.

  BILL: Yes?

  JOE: It must be very nice out there. In summer.

  BILL: We like it. (He stands up.) Say, could you give your little sister a third-alarm—or whatever it takes?

  JOE: She’ll be out when she’s ready.

  BILL: That’s what I’m afraid of.

  JOE: Is this your first date, Bill?

  BILL: How do you mean?

  JOE: In my experience girls don’t always pop right out of their boudoirs the minute a guy calls for ‘em.

  BILL: No? But you sort of expect more speed of a swimming champ, (calling) Hey! Myra!

  MYRA: (She faces the wall as though it were a mirror.) Yeh, Bill, I’m coming right out!

  JOE: Excuse me, will you?

  BILL: Oh, yes. (He faces Myra.)

  JOE: This Bill of yours is a son-of-a-bitch. If I’d stayed in the room with him another minute I’d have busted him one.

  MYRA: Then you’d better stay out. ‘Cause I like him. What’re you doing tonight, Joe?

  JOE: Stay home and write.

  MYRA: You stay home and write too much. Broke? Here’s a dollar. Get you a date with that girl who writes poetry. Doris. She oughta bat out a pretty good sonnet under the proper influences. Oh, hell—I’m not gonna wear any stockings. Coming, Bill! Look! How is the back of my neck? Is it filthy? Christ! (She sprays herself with perfume.) You gotta bathe three times a day to keep fresh in this weather. Doris. Is that her name? I bet that she could be had without too much effort!

  JOE: Myra. Don’t talk that way.

  MYRA: You kill me!

  JOE: Naw, it doesn’t sound right in a kid your age.

  MYRA: I’m twice your age! G’bye, Joe!

  JOE: G’bye, Myra.

  MYRA: (She faces Bill with a dazzling smile.) Hello, darling!

  BILL: Hi. Let’s get outa this sweat-box.

  MYRA: Yeah. (They go out. The Movers come in with a dresser.)

  1ST MOVER: Easy.

  2ND MOVER: Got it?

  1ST MOVER: Yep. Who the fuck closed that door?

  JOE: I’ll get it. Careful down those stairs.

  SILVA: (glancing up from the magazine) A broken mirror is seven years’ bad luck.

  JOE: Aw. Is that right? The stork must’ve dropped us through a whole bunch of ‘em when we were born. How’s the story?

  SILVA: It’s good strong stuff.

  JOE: (glancing at the title) Butterfly and the Tank. I read that one.

  CHILD: (from the street below) Fly, Sheepie, fly! Fly, Sheepie, fly!

  JOE: (reflectively) Fly, Sheepie, fly! You ever played that game?

  SILVA: Naw. Kids that play games are sissies in our neighborhood.

  JOE: We played it. Myra an’ me. Up and down fire-escapes, in an’ out basements. . . . Jeez! We had a swell time. What happens to kids when they grow up?

  SILVA: They grow up. (He turns a page.)

  JOE: Yeh, they grow up. (The sound of roller-skates on the sidewalk rises in the silence, as the light fades. Only the door to the bedroom on the right is clear in a spotlight.

  MOTHER: (softly from the bedroom) Joe? Oh, Joe!

  JOE: Yes, Mother? (Mother appears in the door—a worn, little woman in a dingy wrapper with an expression that is personally troubled and confused.)

  MOTHER: Joe, aren’t you going to bed?

  JOE: Yes. In a minute.

  MOTHER: I think you’ve written enough tonight, Joe.

  JOE: I’m nearly fini
shed. I just wanta finish this sentence.

  MOTHER: Myra’s still out.

  JOE: She went to the Chase Roof.

  MOTHER: Couldn’t you go along with her sometimes? Meet the boys that she goes out with?

  JOE: No, I can’t horn in on her dates. Hell, if I had a job I couldn’t pay tips for that crowd!

  MOTHER: I’m worried about her.

  JOE: What for? She says she’s older than I am, Mom, an’ I guess she’s right.

  MOTHER: No, she’s only a baby. You talk to her, Joe.

  JOE: Okay.

  MOTHER: I regret that she took that job now, Joe. She should’ve stayed on at high-school.

  JOE: She wanted things—money, clothes—you can’t blame her. ‘S Dad out?

  MOTHER: Yes. . . . She’s given up her swimming.

  JOE: She got kicked off the Lorelei team.

  MOTHER: What for, Joe?

  JOE: She broke training rules all the time. Hell, I can’t stop her.

  MOTHER: She listens to you.

  JOE: Not much.

  MOTHER: Joe—

  JOE: Yes?

  MOTHER: Joe, it’s come back on me, Joe.

  JOE: (facing her slowly) What?

  MOTHER: The operation wasn’t no use. And all it cost us, Joe, the bills not paid for it yet!.

  JOE: Mother—what makes you think so?

  MOTHER: The same pain’s started again.

  JOE: How long?

  MOTHER: Oh, some time now.

  JOE: Why didn’t you—?

  MOTHER: Joe . . . what’s the use?

  JOE: Maybe it’s—not what you think! You’ve got to go back. For examination, Mom!

  MOTHER: No. This is the way I look at it, Joe. Like this. I’ve never liked being cramped. I’ve always wanted to have space around me, plenty of space, to live in the country on the top of a hill. I was born in the country, raised there, and I’ve hankered after it lots in the last few years.

  JOE: Yes. I know. (Now he speaks to himself.) Those Sunday afternoon rides in the country, the late yellow sun through an orchard, the twisted shadows, the crazy old wind-beaten house, vacant, lop-sided, and you pointing at it, leaning out of the car, trying to make Dad stop—

  MOTHER: Look! That house, it’s for sale! It oughta go cheap! Twenty acres of apple, a hen-house, and look, a nice barn! It’s run-down now but it wouldn’t cost much to repair! Stop, Floyd, go slow along here!