by Jay Hopler
“Bright boy can do everything,” Max said. “He can cook and everything. You’d make some girl a nice wife, bright boy.”
“Yes?” George said. “Your friend, Ole Andreson, isn’t going to come.”
“We’ll give him ten minutes,” Max said.
Max watched the mirror and the clock. The hands of the clock marked seven o’clock, and then five minutes past seven.
“Come on, Al,” said Max. “We better go. He’s not coming.”
“Better give him five minutes,” Al said from the kitchen.
In the five minutes a man came in, and George explained that the cook was sick.
“Why the hell don’t you get another cook?” the man asked. “Aren’t you running a lunch counter?” He went out.
“Come on, Al,” Max said.
“What about the two bright boys and the nigger?”
“They’re all right.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. We’re through with it.”
“I don’t like it,” said Al. “It’s sloppy. You talk too much.”
“Oh, what the hell,” said Max. “We got to keep amused, haven’t we?”
“You talk too much, all the same,” Al said. He came out from the kitchen. The cutoff barrels of the shotgun made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tight-fitting overcoat. He straightened his coat with his gloved hands.
“So long, bright boy,” he said to George. “You got a lot of luck.”
“That’s the truth,” Max said. “You ought to play the races, bright boy.”
The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. George went back through the swinging-door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook.
“I don’t want any more of that,” said Sam, the cook. “I don’t want any more of that.”
Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before.
“Say,” he said. “What the hell?” He was trying to swagger it off.
"They were going to kill Ole Andreson,” George said. “They were going to shoot him when he came in to eat.”
“Ole Andreson?”
“Sure.”
The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.
“They all gone?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said George. “They’re gone now.”
“I don’t like it,” said the cook. “I don’t like any of it at all.” “Listen,” George said to Nick. “You better go see Ole Andreson.” “All right.”
“You better not have anything to do with it at all,” Sam, the cook, said. “You better stay way out of it.”
“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” George said.
“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.”
“I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?”
The cook turned away.
“Little boys always know what they want to do,” he said.
“He lives up at Hirsch’s rooming house,” George said to Nick.
“I’ll go up there.”
Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc-light down a side street. Three houses up the street was Hirsch’s rooming house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door.
“Is Ole Andreson here?”
“Do you want to see him?”
“Yes, if he’s in.”
Nick followed the woman up a flight of stairs and back to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s somebody to see you, Mr. Andreson,” the woman said.
“It’s Nick Adams.”
“Come in.”
Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.
“What was it?” he asked.
“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”
It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.
“They put us out in the kitchen,” Nick went on. “They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper.”
Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything.
“George thought I better come and tell you about it.”
“There isn’t anything I can do about it,” Ole Andreson said.
“I’ll tell you what they were like.”
“I don’t want to know what they were like,” Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. “Thanks for coming to tell me about it.” “That’s all right.”
Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.
“Don’t you want me to go and see the police?”
“No,” Ole Andreson said. “That wouldn’t do any good.”
“Isn’t there something I could do?”
“No. There ain’t anything to do.”
“Maybe it was just a bluff.”
“No. It ain’t just a bluff.”
Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.
“The only thing is,” he said, talking toward the wall, “I just can’t make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day.”
“Couldn’t you get out of town?”
“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.”
He looked at the wall.
“There ain’t anything to do now.”
“Couldn’t you fix it up some way?”
“No. I got in wrong.” He talked in the same flat voice. “There ain’t anything to do. After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out.”
“I better go back and see George,” Nick said.
“So long,” said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. “Thanks for coming around.”
Nick went out. As he shut the door he saw Ole Andreson with all his clothes on, lying on the bed looking at the wall.
“He’s been in his room all day,” the landlady said downstairs. “I guess he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Andreson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like it.”
“He doesn’t want to go out.”
“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know.”
“I know it.”
“You’d never know it except from the way his face is,” the woman said. They stood talking just inside the street door. “He’s just as gentle.”
“Well, good-night, Mrs. Hirsch,” Nick said.
“I’m not Mrs. Hirsch,” the woman said. “She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell.”
“Well, good-night, Mrs. Bell,” Nick said.
“Good-night,” the woman said.
Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc-light, and then along the car-tracks to Henry’s eating house. George was inside, back of the counter.
“Did you see Ole?”
“Yes,” said Nick. “He’s in his room and he won’t go out.”
The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick’s voice.
“I don’t even listen to it,” he said and shut the door.
“Did you tell him about it?” George asked.
“Sure. I told him but he knows what it’s all about.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“I guess they will.”
“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.”
“I guess so,” said Nick.
“It’s a hell of a thing.”
“It’s an awful
thing,” Nick said.
They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.
“I wonder what he did?” Nick said.
“Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.”
“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.
“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”
“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”
“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”
SCREEN IMAGE:[Royal Emerald Hotel, Nassau]
Mark Rudman
Viciousness incarnate. Meanness engraved.
Boneless, atomic, he leaned on the swivel
stool. His back to the bar.
To the gilded mirrors inhabited
by a jagged skyline, bottles;
gold labels: Chivas, Cointreau, Cutty Sark. …
Anyone would have noted this presence
even if the man had been
no one, but with his initials
in red on shirt cuffs, cuff links,
lapels, blazer breast pocket, and socks,
it seemed almost disingenuous
for the boy to ask “Are you—?—
but it was the best he could do.
Sloe-eyed, conspiratorial, the actor spoke
out of the side of his mouth
but his gravelly menacing bass
carried kind words. “Pleased to meet you
son. Would you—mind—if I—bought—you a drink?
Bartender—get the boy a—‘Shirley’—”
and then he winked!—a—‘Roy Rogers.’"
They drank in dark and blissful silence.
“Just do me a favor, son; don’t tell anyone
you saw me. I’m here … to get away.”
The warm and intimate way the actor delivered these words
made the boy keen to keep a vow … of silence;
to ignore his chance to shine in the rec-room among the jaded kids
who’d waste no time making sure everyone who could
know would know;
no, he would not tell that freckled snot from Great Neck
who came to Nassau with his own Ping-Pong racquet. …
The actor’s equally glamorous friends,
who’d entered without a sound,
pressed the rims of cocktail glasses to their lips;
knocked down their martinis in one
gulp; hissed: retracted their chins like cobras.
The leather armrests on the bar let out a gasp
which led the two women to exchange quick
I didn’t do it, did you? glances,
as if their rigid posture and breathless
diaphragms betrayed them, along
with their volitionless nylon rustling. …
They were prisoners anyway:
of masklike makeup; tintinnabulating bracelets;
minuscule purses without shoulder straps
and strapless, tight-waisted dresses; umbrella-spined
bras;
nylons, garters, girdles, high heels: glued hair.
(Was the woman who was “with” the actor
reciting a silent mantra
that he himself would never do anything
like hurl boiling coffee in her face
as he did to Gloria Graham
in The Big Heat?)
Silken and silver were the hair and suit and voice
of the man who uttered the actor’s first name.
Wouldn’t “our table’s ready” have been sufficient?
The actor dispersed like liquid mercury—
too early in time to draw some wry pleasure
from the uncanny resemblance
between the “special effect” on celluloid
and his own flesh and blood.
The boy did not move but eyed the party
through the speckled mirror; and though
he was as aware as any American
that whatever the hadn’t done
in real life or was yet to do,
like push the future
President out of a speeding coupe in The Killers …
that he owed his renown to the brazen, indomitable cop
he played on M-Squad, the boy saw him repeatedly
as the itinerant cruelty in The Missouri Traveller
who lashed that boy’s back in the heat-stricken barn
for feeding the skeletal horses extra hay.
He couldn’t remember why he and his father
had gone to this bleak, obscure “sleeper” anyway,
unless, alone together in a place he could not remember,
they had time to kill.
THE SAME ONLY DIFFERENT!
Jiri Kajanë
The Ministry of Slogans seemed on the verge of closing for good. Even from my small office tucked away in the rear of the building it was easy to feel the mood shifting, everything changing, the frenetic pace of the previous months possibly dwindling to the lazy resignation of one last day. Clearly, the work generated by our department had not produced the desired results. Many young apprentices sulked in the hallways, and an even greater number of their superiors joined them, confidence now gone, roles suddenly undefined. It was no longer feasible to change the spirit of the people with a few catchy words placed in a memorable order.
Strangely, I, the deputy creative director of slogans, a person supposedly with much to lose, felt no dread at all. I was entirely calm, almost looking forward to the transformation that the coming days would bring to both the city and to my own life. I began cleaning the office with a great attention to detail—repairing the stapler, sharpening pencils, carefully alphabetizing scattered file folders. When I finished, the room looked nearly identical to the one I’d walked into that first summer morning many years back. Gone were all of my personal effects—the maps that had once decorated the walls, a pair of soccer trophies, even the graying photo of my father dressed in his favorite sweater.
It was still early, but outside toward the square, people had begun assembling—just as they’d done all week—their kinetic energy a sharp contrast to me in the office, quietly organizing obsolete files. Unlike me, the protestors seemed frantic in their fight against a government that no longer seemed to exist.
From my office window, I could see some of them making their way down to join in. Among the crowd was a lone figure I recognized, Altin Leka, an old acquaintance from the university. He was pushing a shiny white cart, preparing to sell ice cream. Soon the people passed him by, leaving Altin ambling along the road alone.
Ten minutes later, I was down there myself, headed in the opposite direction toward the line of buses. I’d planned on taking a day trip to visit my father, but soon discovered, one by one, that the bus doors were locked and the vehicles empty. The drivers had probably gone and joined the celebration, knowing that few if any passengers could be recruited today. As I began thinking of alternate plans, other ways I could reach my father’s, I noticed my young friend Leni up the street, huddled in an apartment doorway with a taller, older woman. The way they were standing so closely, both wearing sizable coats, seemed quite strange for such a hot day.
“Hello,” Leni yelled with an exaggerated wave, as if we had not met only a few hours earlier for lunch.
“Hello,” I yelled back, trying to match his enthusiasm. As I walked toward them, the woman whispered something into Leni’s ear, and then, rather discreetly, concealed a light blue paper bag she’d been holding.
“This is Mila,” Leni said as I approached. “We were just heading back to the hotel.”
“Please join us,” she said, smiling. Her awkward accent and long round face made me think that she might be from the North. There was a short pause as I glanced at Leni for some advice, some hint as to the answer he expected from me. Since gaining his restaurant position in the Hotel Dajti, he’d
specialized in making the acquaintance of female guests. I did not want to interfere.
“I’m sure my friend has other matters to attend to,” Leni quickly said. This was one of his standard lines, but the tone of his voice seemed shaky, hollow, and this surprised me. At that moment, Mila’s eyes met mine, focused and warm, and I realized she seemed far closer to my age than Leni’s. In the past, he’d offered many times to match me up with women like her, older women from the hotel. Why had he forgotten that offer now? During the first few years after my separation from Ana, I’d refused his help. But less than a month ago, I had finally succumbed to the idea.
“No, no, your friend must join us,” Mila said firmly, taking me with one arm and Leni with the other. “Come.”
As she pulled us toward the hotel, I noticed how tall and wide she was. In comparison, Leni and his small size seemed almost comical tucked beneath her strong arm. Yet for all of this strength, there was also a fragileness in Mila that I detected. She had a solid profile, very striking, that reminded me of the Italian television stars I had seen on Leni’s brother’s television. But something about her lips, how the upper one was as full as the lower, and how the tiny gap between her teeth appeared only when she smiled, all seemed to relax me.
