by Jay Hopler
“Where is he?” said Jeremiah.
“In town,” the woman said. “He’s at the club, probably. That’s the Five Aces Club, acrost from the bank. He tole me not to wait on him tonight so I didn’t, but he never tole me to expeck some guests for supper. As a fact, he never tells me much,” she laughed. “Bet you tell your wife where you are or whatcha doing or who’s coming out for supper. Bet you—”
“How do you spell that?” Jeremiah said patiently.
“Spell it? Huh? Spell what?”
“The place he’s at.”
“Acrost from the bank, the Five Aces—I don’t know, how do you spell five? It’s a number five, they got it on a sign; you know how five looks? That’s it.” Both Jeremiah and Sweet Gum nodded. “Then ‘Aces,’ that’s out there too—begins with A, A S or A C, then S on the end—it’s more than one. Acrost from the bank. But why don’t you come in and wait, he’ll be—”
“We surely thank you,” Jeremiah said with a faint smile, “but we got bus’ness to attend to. Maybe later on.”
It took them a while to walk back to town. Jeremiah’s fingers were busier than ever. Most of the time they were scratching at his head, then darting into his ears or nose and darting back out again. Sweet Gum walked behind so that his giggling would not annoy Jeremiah. They passed houses, farmers’ markets, a gas station with an old model-T out front filled with tires. They passed a diner that was boarded up, and the movie house, in front of which the boys with straw hats stood around smoking. When Sweet Gum and Jeremiah passed, the boys stared in silence; even the smoke from their cigarettes stiffened in the air.
Town began suddenly: a drug store, an old country store on a corner. In a clapboard shanty, a dentist’s office advertised in bright green paint. There were no sidewalks, so Jeremiah and Sweet Gum walked at the side of the road. “Down there looks like the bank,” Jeremiah said, waving his pistol at something ahead; Sweet Gum did not see it. They walked on. “We come a long way,” Jeremiah said in a strange remote voice, like a man embarking on a speech. “Done a lot this past week or however long it’s been. I never known till now that I was born for this life—did you? Thought it’d be for me like anyone else—a farm and cows maybe and a fambly to raise up and maybe chickens, the wife could take care of them; I mostly had the wife picked out, too. Won’t tell you which one. But now I know different. Now I see it was in me all along, from before I kilt them two men even—I thought I done that by accident, had too much to drink—something in a dream—but no, now I know better; now I got it clear.” A few cars passed them: people out for after-supper rides. A girl of about two, with thin blond hair, leaned out a window and waved sweetly at Sweet Gum. “Now I know,” Jeremiah said, so strangely that Sweet Gum felt embarrassed in spite of his confusion, “that there isn’t a person but wouldn’t like to do that, what I did. Or to set a place afire, say—any place—their own house even. Set it all afire, house and grass and trees alike, all the same. Was there ever a difference between a house people live in and trees outside that they name? Them trees make you name them, think up names for them as soon as you see them, what choice does a man have! Never no choice! Get rid of it all, fire it all up, all the things that bother you, that keep you from yourself, and people, too—and people, too—Sweet Gum, I got to tell you now, with us both coming so far like we did, that I’m your pa here, Iam, Jeremiah your pa after all these years, all the way from the beginning!”
They continued walking. Sweet Gum blinked once or twice. Jeremiah’s words bored through that tiny hole in the side of his head, flipped themselves around right side up to make sense: but Sweet Gum only hid a sudden laugh with his hand, stared at the sweaty back of Jeremiah’s old funeral suit, and thought aloud, “Is that so.” “That so, boy, all the way from the beginning,” Jeremiah said, stifling a yawn. “This-here is your own pa walking right in front of you.”
Sweet Gum should have said something, but he could not think of it and so let it pass. They were approaching the 5 Aces Club now, heading toward it as if it were a magnet. Sweet Gum heard voices behind him and glanced around: the group of boys was following them, idly and at a distance; a man in overalls had joined them, looking sour and disapproving. Sweet Gum forgot them as soon as he turned again. They passed a Laundromat with orange signs: OPEN 24 HOURS EACH DAY WASH 20¢ DRY 10¢. A few people were inside in spite of the heat. In the doorway children kicked at one another and did not even glance up at Jeremiah and Sweet Gum. Then there was a 5¢ IN 25¢ AND $ 1.00 STORE, gold letters on a red background, windows crowded and stuffed with merchandise; but it was closed. Then the club itself, coming so fast Sweet Gum’s eye twitched more than ever and he had to hold onto it with his palm to keep it from jumping out of his head. “Spose he’s in there,” Sweet Gum whimpered, “spose he gets to talking. Don’t let him talk. Please. Don’t let him. Shoot him right off. If I hear talk of horses or gun or twice as much money—”
The club had had a window at one time, a big square window like something in a shoe store, but now it was completely hidden by tin foil. There were advertisements for beer and cigarettes everywhere: beautiful pink-cheeked girls, men with black hair and big chests and clean white gleaming teeth. Long muscular thighs, smooth legs, slender ankles, silver-painted toenails, tatooed arms and backs of hands; and curly-haired chests and dimpled chests, chests bare and bronze in the sun, chests demurely proud in red polka-dot halters—everything mixed together! Faces channeled themselves out of blue skies and rushed at Sweet Gum with their fixed serene smiles. That there is heaven, Sweet Gum thought suddenly, with a certainty he had never before felt about life—as if, about to leave it, he might pass judgment on it. His stomach ached with silent sobs, as much for that lost heaven as for the duties of this familiar, demanding world.
Jeremiah had opened the door to the tavern. “You, Motley, come out here a minute.” Someone answered inside but Jeremiah went on patiently, “Motley. Some bus’ness outside.”
Jeremiah let the door close. Sweet Gum clutched at him. “Is he coming? Is he? Was that him inside?” he said. “Don’t let him talk none. Shoot him first or let me—shoot him—”
“We ain’t going to shoot him yet.”
“But what if he talks of more horses or another gun? What if—”
“He ain’t. Get back, now—”
“I’m going to shoot him—”
“Goddamn you, boy, you stand back,” Jeremiah shouted.
“Why’s it always you at the center of trouble? Any goddamn thing that bothers me these days, you’re in the middle!”
“Don’t let him talk none. If he—”
“We got to talk to him. Got to tell him we come for the reward.”
“Reward?” Sweet Gum’s sobs broke through to the surface. “Reward? I don’t remember none, what reward? What? He’s going to talk, going to—”
Jeremiah pushed him away and opened the door again. “Motley!” he yelled. Sweet Gum’s head was so clamoring with voices that he could not be sure if he heard anyone answer. “He’s coming, guess it’s him,” Jeremiah said vaguely. “Stand back now, boy, and don’t you do no reckless shooting your pa will have to clean up after—”
“I’m going to shoot him,” Sweet Gum cried, “or he’ll talk like before—If he talks and we hear him we got to go back and be in the field again. We got to hide there. And Aunt Clarey, I always loved her so, how it’s for her to see us hiding there? Even if she can’t see much. If he comes out and talks we got to—”
“Boy, I’m telling you!”
“Don’t you call me boy!”
The door opened suddenly, angrily. Sweet Gum raised his pistol, took a giant step backward, and was about to shoot when a stranger appeared in the doorway, a big pot-bellied bald man with a towel used for an apron tucked in his belt. “What the hell—” the man roared.
Sweet Gum, shocked, staggered back. Inside his head the clamoring arose to a mighty scream and, in defense, he turned to Jeremiah. Everything focused on Jeremiah, the sun itself s
eemed to glare on his bulging eyes. Sweet Gum cried: “You! It was you I been hunting these twenty years!” But somehow in his confusion he had turned around, or half around, and when he fired he did not shoot Jeremiah at all, or any man at all, but instead a woman—a stranger, a stocky woman with a sunburned, pleasant, bossy face, dressed in jeans and a man’s dirty white shirt. She fell right onto the basket of damp laundry she was carrying. Blood burst out of nowhere, onto the clothes, and also out of nowhere appeared two children, shrieking and screaming.
Sweet Gum backed away. A crowd, an untidy circle, was gathering about the fallen woman. Sweet Gum, dazed, put the barrel of the pistol to his lips and stared, still backing away, stumbling. He had been cheated: he could not get things clear: his whole life had flooded up to this moment and now was dammed and could not get past, everything was over. He could have wept for the end of his young life (mistakenly, as it turned out, for in less than three years he would be working downriver at the tomato canning factory, making good money), spilled here on the dirt road, splashing and sucked away, while everyone stood around gawking.
MEMORIES OF WEST STREET AND LEPKE
Robert Lowell
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is a “young Republican.”
I have a nine months’ daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.
These are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I’d never heard
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
He taught me the “hospital tuck,”
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated’s czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair—
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. …
CAIN
Andrew Vachs
1
“Look at my Buster … look what they did to him.”
The old man pointed a shaking finger at the dog, a big German shepherd. The animal was cowering in a corner of the kitchen of the railroad flat—his fine head was lopsided, a piece of his skull missing under the ragged fur. A deep pocket of scar tissue glowed white where one eye had been, the other was cataract-milky, fire-dotted with fear. The dog’s tail hung behind him at a demented angle, one front paw hung useless in a plaster cast.
“Who did it?”
The old man wasn’t listening, not finished yet. Squeezing the wound to get the pus out. “Buster guards out back, where the chicken wire is. They tormented him, threw stuff at him, made him crazy. Then they cut the lock. Two of them. One had a baseball bat, the other had a piece of pipe. My Buster … he wouldn’t hurt anyone. They beat on him, over and over, laughing. I ran downstairs to stop them … they just slapped me, like I was a fly. They did my Buster so bad, it even hurts him when I try and rub him.”
The old man sat crying at his kitchen table.
The dog watched me, a thin whine coming from his open mouth. Half his teeth were missing.
“You know who did it,” I said. It wasn’t a question. He didn’t know, he wouldn’t have called me—I’m no private eye.
“I called … I called the cops. 911. They never came. I went down to the precinct. The man at the desk, he said to call the ASPCA.”
“You know who they are?”
“I don’t know their names. Two men, young men. One has big muscles, the other’s skinny.”
“They’re from around here?”
“I don’t know. They’re always together—I’ve seen them before. Everybody knows them. They have their heads shaved, too.”
“Everybody knows them?”
“Everybody. They beat other dogs, too. They make the dogs bark at them, then they …” He was crying again. I waited, watching the dog.
“They come back. I see them walking down the alley. Almost every day. I can’t leave Buster outside anymore—can’t even take him for a walk. I have to clean up after him now.”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“You called me. You got my name from somewhere. You know what I do.”
The old man got up, knelt next to his dog. Put his hand gently on the dog’s head. “Buster used to be the toughest dog in the world—wasn’t afraid of nothing. I had him ever since he was a pup. He won’t even look out the back window with me now.”
“What do you want?” I asked him again.
They both looked at me. “You know,” the old man said.
2
A freestanding brick building in Red Hook, not far from the waterfront, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. I rang the bell. A dog snarled a warning. I looked into the mirrored glass, knowing they could see me. The steel door opened. A man in a white T-shirt over floppy black trousers opened the door. He was barefoot, dark hair cropped close, body so smooth it might have been extruded from rubber. He bowed slightly. I returned his bow, followed him inside.
A rectangular room, roughened wood floor. A canvas-wrapped heavy bag swung from the ceiling in one corner. In another, a car tire was suspended from a thick rope. A pair of long wood staves hung on hooks.
“I’ll get him,” the man said.
I waited, standing in one spot.
He returned, leading a dog by a chain. A broad-chested pit bull, all white except for a black patch over one eye. The dog watched me, cobra-calm.
“Here he is,” the man said.
“You sure he’ll do it?”
“Guaranteed.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cain.”
I squatted down, said the dog’s name, scratched him behind his erect ears when he came to me.
“You want to practice with him?”
“Yeah, I’d better. I know the commands you gave me, but …”
“Wait here.”
I played with Cain, putting him through standard-obedience paces. He was a machine, perfect.
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The trainer came back into the room. Two other men with him, dressed in full agitator’s suits, leather-lined and padded. Masks on their faces, like hockey goalies wear.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
3
I walked down the alley behind the old man’s building, Cain on a thin leather leash, held lightly in my left hand. The dog knew the route by now—it was our fifth straight day.
They turned the corner fifty feet from me. The smaller one had a baseball bat over his shoulder, the muscleman slapped a piece of lead pipe into one palm.
They closed in. I stepped aside to let them pass, pulling Cain close to my leg.
They didn’t walk past. The smaller one planted his feet, looking into my eyes.
“Hey, man. That’s a pit bull, right? Pretty tough dogs, I heard.” “No, he’s not tough,” I said, a catch in my voice. “He’s just a pet.”
“He looks like a bad dog to me,” the big guy said, poking the lead pipe into the dog’s face, stabbing. Cain stepped out of the way.
“Please don’t hurt my dog,” I begged them, pulling up on the leash.
Cain leaped into my arms, his face against my chest. I could feel the bunched muscles in his legs, all four paws flat against me.
“Aw, is your dog scared, man?” the big one sneered, stepping close to me, slapping the dog’s back with the pipe.
