Short Stories: Five Decades (30 page)

“Boys,” the bartender said. “Talk about something else, boys.”

“The truth is,” Sweeney said, “I wouldn’t mind if there was a war. I make eleven dollars a week. Any change would be an improvement.”

“This is the war of the Hotel Pee-yeah,” Lubbock said.

“What do you mean by that?” Di Calco looked at him suspiciously, sensing a new insult to the Italian army.

“On Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street. They tea-dance.” Lubbock scowled. “They tea-dance for the Empiuh.”

“What’s objectionable about
that?
” the bartender asked.

“Yuh ever see the people that go into the Hotel Pee-yeah?” Lubbock leaned over the bar and scowled at the bartender. “The little fat rabbits in the mink coats?”

“The best people,” the bartender said defiantly.

“Yeah,” Lubbock smiled mirthlessly. “If they’re for anything, it must be wrong.”

“I’m speaking carefully,” Di Calco said in measured tones. “I don’t want to be misconstrued, but to a neutral ear you sound like a Communist.”

Lubbock laughed, drained his beer. “I hate the Communists,” he said. “They are busy slitting their own throats seven days a week. Another beer, Buffalo Bill.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Buffalo Bill.” The bartender filled Lubbock’s glass. “You start something like that, you can wind up making life intolerable.” He flipped the head off the glass and pushed it in front of Lubbock.

“A statue in Wyoming …” Lubbock shook his head wonderingly. “Today they tea-dance for the Empiuh, tomorrow we get shot for the Empiuh.”

“It don’t necessarily follow.” Sweeney moved closer, earnestly.

“Mr. Sweeney, of the flying Sweeneys.” Lubbock patted him gently on the wrist. “The reader of the
New York Times
. I’ll put a lily on yer grave in the Balkans.”

“It may be necessary,” Di Calco said. “It may be necessary to supply soldiers; it may be necessary for Sweeney to get shot.”

“Don’t make it so personal,” Sweeney said angrily.

“Before we get through, Mr. Sweeney,” Lubbock put his arm confidentially around him, “this war is going to be very personal to you and me. It will not be very personal to the rabbits from the Hotel Pee-yeah.”

“Why can’t you leave the Hotel Pierre out of this discussion?” the bartender complained.

“The snow will fall,” Lubbock shouted, “and we’ll be sitting in tents!” He turned on Di Calco. “The Italian patriot. I’d like to ask yuh a question.”

“Always remember,” Di Calco said coldly, “that I’m an American citizen.”

“How will you feel, George Washington, sitting behind a machine gun with Wops running at you?”

“I’ll do my duty,” Di Calco said doggedly. “And don’t use the term ‘Wop.’”

“What do you mean running
at
him?” Sweeney roared. “The Italian army don’t run at anything but the rear.”

“Remember,” Di Calco shouted at Sweeney, “I have a standing invitation to meet you outside.”

“Boys,” the bartender cried. “Talk about other matters. Please …”

“One war after another,” Lubbock marveled. “One after another, and they get poor sons of bitches like you into tents in the wintertime, and yuh never catch on.”

“I’m overlooking the language.” Sweeney took a step back and spoke dispassionately, like a debater. “But I’d like to hear your solution. Since you’re so clear on the subject.”

“I don’t want to overlook the language,” Di Calco said hotly.

“Let him talk.” Sweeney waved his hand majestically. “Let’s hear everybody’s point of view. Let the Dutchman talk.”

“Well …” Lubbock started.

“Don’t be insulting,” the bartender said. “It’s late and I’m ready to close up the bar anyway, so don’t insult the patrons.”

Lubbock rinsed his mouth with beer, let it slide slowly down his throat. “Don’t yuh ever clean the pipes?” he asked the bartender. “Yuh know, that’s the most important thing about beer—the pipes.”

“He’s got a comment on everything!” Di Calco said angrily. “This country’s full of them!”

“They are dividing up the world,” Lubbock said. “I got eighty-five cents to my name. No matter which way they finish dividing, I’ll be lucky to still have eighty-five cents when it’s all over.”

“That’s not the way to approach the problem,” said Sweeney. “Your eighty-five cents.”

“Will I get Greece?” Lubbock pointed his huge finger threateningly at Sweeney. “Will Di Calco get China?”

“Who wants China?” Di Calco asked triumphantly.

“We get one thing,” Lubbock said soberly. “You and me and Sweeney and Buffalo Bill …”

“Please,” said the bartender.

“We get trouble. The workingman gets trouble.” Lubbock sighed and looked sadly up at the ceiling, and the other men silently drank their beer. “Military strategists agree,” Lubbock said, his tongue going proudly over the phrase, “that it takes four men to attack a position defended by one man.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Sweeney demanded.

“This war is going to be fought in Europe, in Africa, in Asia,” Lubbock chanted. “It is not going to be fought in William Cody’s Bar.”

“Sorry I can’t oblige you,” the bartender said sarcastically.

“I’ve studied the situation,” Lubbock said, “and I’ve decided that there’s going to be four times as many Americans killed as anybody else. It stands to reason. They’re not going to attack us here, are they? We’re going to take the offensive. Four to one!” He banged the bar with savage certainty. “Us four poor dumb yokels’ll get it just to put one lousy Dutchman out of the way. Military strategy guarantees!”

“Don’t yell so loud,” the bartender said nervously. “The people upstairs don’t like me.”

“The worst thing is,” Lubbock shouted, glaring wildly around him, “the worst thing is I look around and I see the world full of poor dumb stupid bastards like Sweeney and Di Calco and William Cody!”

“The language,” Di Calco snarled. “Watch the language.”

“Hitler has to be beaten!” Sweeney yelled. “That’s a fundamental fact.”

“Hitler has to be beaten!” Lubbock’s voice sank to a significant, harsh whisper. “Why does Hitler have to be beaten? Because poor ignorant bastards like you put him there in the first place and left him there in the second place and went out to shoot him down in the third place and in the meantime just drank yer beer and argued in bars!”

“Don’t accuse me,” said Sweeney. “I didn’t put Hitler any place.”

“Sweeneys all over the world!” Lubbock shouted. “And now I got to get shot for it. I got to sit in tents in the wintertime!” Suddenly he grabbed Sweeney by the collar with one hand. “Say …” Sweeney gasped. Lubbock’s other hand shot out, grasped Di Calco by his collar. Lubbock drew the two men close to his face and stared with terrible loathing at them. “I would like to mash yer stupid thick heads,” he whispered.

“Now, lissen,” Di Calco gasped.

“Boys,” said the bartender, reaching for the sawed-off baseball bat he kept under the counter.

“If I get shot it’s your fault!” Lubbock shook the two men fiercely. “I oughta kill yuh. I feel like killin’ every dumb slob walkin’ the streets …”

Di Calco reached back for a beer bottle and Sweeney grabbed the big hand at his throat and the bartender lifted the sawed-off baseball bat. The door swung open and a girl stepped through it and looked blankly at them.

“Go right ahead,” she said, the expression on her face not surprised or worried or amused. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

“Boys …” the bartender said and put the baseball bat away. Lubbock gave Sweeney and Di Calco a last little push and released them and turned back to his beer.

“People like you,” Sweeney murmured, outraged, “people like you they ought to commit to asylums.”

Di Calco straightened his tie and tried to smile gallantly through his rage at the girl, who was still standing by the open door, hatless, her dirty blonde hair falling straight down to her shoulders. She was a thin girl, with the bones showing plainly in her face, and her hands skinny and rough coming out of the sleeves of the light old gray coat she was wearing. Her face was very tired, as though she had been working too long, too many nights.

“Would you like to close the door, Miss?” the bartender asked. “It’s getting awfully cold.”

The girl wearily closed the door and stood against it for a moment, wearily surveying the four men.

“I need some help,” she said.

“Now, Miss …” the bartender started.

“Oh, shut up!” she snapped at him. Her voice was flat and worn. “I’m not bumming anything. My sister’s just had a kid and she’s laying in a stinking little hospital and she was bleeding all day and they gave her two transfusions and that’s all they got and they just told me maybe she’s dyin’. I been walkin’ past this saloon for the last half hour watchin’ you four guys talkin’, gettin’ up nerve to come in. She needs blood. Any you guys got some blood you don’t need?” The girl smiled a little.

The men carefully avoided looking at each other.

“We’re busted,” the girl said, her tone as flat as ever. “The kid came out seven months and her husband’s a sailor; he’s on his way to Portugal and there’s nobody in this whole goddamned, freezin’ town I can turn to.” She shrugged. “My blood’s the wrong type.” She took a step nearer the bar. “She’s only nineteen years old, my sister. She had to go marry a sailor …” Lubbock turned and looked at her.

“All right,” Lubbock said. “I’ll go with yuh.”

“Me, too,” said Di Calco.

Sweeney opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I hate hospitals,” he said. “But I’ll come along.”

Lubbock turned and looked slowly at the bartender.

“It’s late anyway,” the bartender said, nervously drying the bar with a towel. “I might as well come along, just in case.… My type blood might … Yes.” He nodded vigorously, and started taking off his apron.

Lubbock reached over the bar and brought up a bottle of rye and a glass and silently poured it and pushed it in front of the girl. The girl took it without smiling and drained it in one gulp.

They all sat in the dreary hospital clinic room with the old dead light of the hospital on them and all the weary sorrowful smells of the hospital swelling around them. They sat without talking, waiting for the interne to come and tell them which one of them had the right type of blood for the transfusion. Lubbock sat with his hands between his knees, occasionally glancing sharply at Sweeney and Di Calco and Cody, all of them nervously squirming on their benches. Only the girl walked slowly back and forth down the middle of the room, smoking a cigarette, the smoke curling slowly over her lank, blonde hair.

The door opened and the interne came in and touched Lubbock on the arm. “You’re elected,” he said.

Lubbock took a deep breath and stood up. He looked around him, at Di Calco, at Sweeney, at Cody, triumphantly, smiled at the girl, and followed the interne out of the room.

When he was through, when the blood had poured out of his veins, slowly and delicately, into the veins of the pale, quiet girl on the table next to him, Lubbock got up and bent over her and whispered, “You’re going to be all right,” and she smiled weakly at him.

Then he put on his coat and went back into the clinic room. The others were still there. They stood there, scowling at him in the blue hospital light. He smiled widely at them.

“Everything all right?” Di Calco asked solemnly.

“Everything’s fine,” Lubbock said cheerfully. “My blood is singing in her system like whisky.”

Di Calco looked at Sweeney, Sweeney at Cody, each with doubt and hesitancy in his eye.

“Say, Dutchman,” Sweeney said loudly, “we’ll buy you a drink. What d’yuh say?”

They waited, tense, almost ready for attack.

Lubbock looked consideringly at them. Cody put up the collar of his coat.

“Sure,” Lubbock said, putting his arm around the girl. “It’ll be an honor.”

They walked out through the hospital doors together.

Preach on the Dusty Roads

N
elson Weaver sat at his desk and wrote, “Labor … Bridgeport plant … $1,435,639.77.” Then he put his sharply pointed hard pencil down among the nine other sharply pointed hard pencils arrayed in severe line on the right side of the shining desk, below the silver-framed photograph of his dead wife.

He looked at the leather clock on the back edge of his desk. 10:35. Robert wouldn’t be along for ten minutes yet.

Nelson Weaver picked up his pencil and looked at the long sheets of paper, closely covered with typewritten figures, to his right. “Depreciation … $3,100,456.25,” he wrote.

The tax sheets for Marshall and Co., Valves and Turbines, were nearly done. He had sat at this desk for thirty-five days, working slowly and carefully, from time to time deliberately putting down a number on the page, like Cézanne with his six strokes a day on a water color, until the huge elaborate structure of Marshall and Co.’s finances, which reached from bank to bank and country to country, from Wilmington, Delaware, where it was incorporated, to Chungking, China, where it sold electrical equipment to Chiang Kai-shek; until all this sprawling, complex history of money paid and money gained and credit offered and rejected and profit and loss, palpable and impalpable, was laid bare and comprehensible on five short pages of his clean accountant’s figures.