Sweet Thursday (26 page)

Again it was a Sweet Thursday in the spring. The sun took a leap toward summer and loosed the furled petals of the golden poppies. Before noon you could smell the spice of blue lupines from the fields around Fort Ord.

It was a sweet day for all manner of rattlesnakes. On the parade ground a jackrabbit, crazy with spring, strolled in March Hare madness across the rifle range and drew joyous fire from two companies before he skidded to safety behind a sand dune. That jackrabbit's moment of grandeur cost the government eight hundred and ninety dollars and gladdened the hearts of one hell of a lot of soldiers.

Miss Graves awakened breathless with expectancy. She sang a scale in half-tones and found that her voice was back and all was well with the world. And she was right. At eleven o'clock the Monarch butterflies came boiling in from across the bay and landed in their millions on the pine trees, where they sucked the thick sweet juice and got cockeyed. The butterfly committee met in emergency session in the fire house and got out the crowns of fairies and the long brown underwear of Indians. The mayor pro tem of Pacific Grove wrote a proclamation for the evening paper.

The tide was very low that morning, preparing for the spring tides, and the warm sun dried the seaweed so that billions of flies came on excursion to feed.

People felt good. Judge Albertson discharged the seer on the recommendation of the Safeway manager.

Dr. Horace Dormody whistled through his mask over an appendectomy and told a political joke to the anesthetist, but he didn't mention Doc's broken arm. A patient's problems, no matter how funny, were sacred to Dr. Horace. But he couldn't help chuckling discreetly to himself now and then.

How did the word spread about Doc's arm? Who knows? Fauna heard it with her crullers. Alice, Mabel, and Becky got it with their orange juice. The Patrón heard it from Cacahuete, who thereupon rushed to the beach and played three loud and uninhibited choruses of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” using six changes of key.

Wide Ida was siphoning Pine Canyon whisky into Old Crow bottles when she heard it.

Mack and the boys had the news early, and it gave them something pressing to do.

Suzy opened up the Poppy that morning. The counter was crowded with breakfasters who dawdled over coffee. It was well into the morning before Suzy heard that Doc had broken his arm. And then she couldn't do anything about it because Ella was getting a permanent. But after she heard it some mid-morning customers got curious ser vice from a Suzy who looked blankly over their heads when they spoke to her. She called Mr. MacMinimin Mr. Gross, and she called Mr. Gross “you” and served his eggs straight up which sickened him.

Mack was first on the scene. He didn't even put on his shoes. He regarded the new cast, which still hadn't cooled off, and listened to the only explanation Doc could think of—that he had got his arm caught between the cot and the wall.

“What you going to do?” Mack asked.

“I don't know. I have to get south, I have to!”

Mack was about to make an offer when a thought came to him that made him say, “Maybe something'll turn up.” He bolted for the Palace Flop house.

Once there, he went to Hazel's bed and found it pristine and unwrinkled.

“He ain't been in,” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well, what do you think of that?” Mack said with admiration. “Why, the sweet son-of-a-bitch!”

Mack went out to the cypress tree and crawled under its low hanging limbs, and he dragged Hazel out the way you'd drag a puppy from under a bed and half carried him up to the Palace Flop house.

Hazel was far gone in emotional fatigue. “I had to,” he said hopelessly.

“Anybody seen Suzy?” Mack asked.

“I seen her go to work early,” said Eddie.

“Well, you better go break the news to her. Do it offhand,” said Mack. “Now, Hazel, how'd you do it?”

“You mad with me?”

“Hell no,” said Mack. “'Course we don't know how she'll work out, but it's a step in the right direction.” He turned to the two Whiteys. “I want you should notice Hazel didn't bust Doc's leg. That was good judgment. Doc can walk but he can't work. You, Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 2, “I want you should get over to Doc's and hang around. If anybody offers to drive him down to La Jolla you take care of it. Where's the indoor-ball bat?”

“I throwed it in the bay,” said Hazel.

“So that's what it was! Whitey, you get yourself a couple of feet of gas pipe.”

Hazel went into collapse. Mack sat on the edge of his bed and placed and replaced cold damp rags on Hazel's feverish brow.

Hazel struggled for speech. “Mack,” he said, “I can't do her. I don't care if the stars or even the cops say I got to, I can't do her. I ain't got the poop.”

“What you talking about? You already done her.”

“I don't mean that. You tell Fauna she got to get somebody else for President of the United States.”

Mack stared down at him in amazement. “I'll be damned,” he said. “I thought you'd forgot.”

“I practiced,” said Hazel brokenly. “I don't want to let nobody down, Mack, but I just ain't no good at it. Try and get me off, will you, Mack? Please? Pretty goddam please?”

Mack's eyes brimmed with compassion. “Well, you sweet bastard,” he said. “You poor little rabbit. Don't you worry. Ain't nobody going to force you. You done noble stuff. Wasn't nobody with guts but you.”

“It ain't oysters,” Hazel said. “Hell, I could do that. I'd eat old socks if I had to. It's just—the job's too big for me. I'd mess up the whole country.”

Mack said, “You just lay there, Hazel baby, Mack's going to take care of it. There ain't nobody brave as you. Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 1, “you set here on Hazel's bed and kind of pet him. Don't let him get up until I get back.” And Mack hurried out.

“You got to do something and do it quick,” Mack said to Fauna. “S'pose Hazel gets another noble idea—why, hell, he might kill somebody.”

“Yeah,” said Fauna, “I can see how it is. Just let me get my stuff together. You think he'd like a nice monkey head?”

“He'd love it,” said Mack. “He needs it.”

Fauna held her chart in front of Hazel's eyes. “Anybody can make a mistake,” she said. “They was a fly speck on the chart. Saturn wasn't in the bicuspid at all.”

Hazel said suspiciously, “How do I know you ain't malarkying me now just to make me feel good?”

“How many toes you got?”

“I counted them—nine.”

“Count them again.”

Hazel slipped off his shoes. “Looks like the same as before,” he said.

“Look at that little toe kind of bent under. Hell, Hazel, I may of made a mistake with a fly speck, but you miscounted your toes! You got ten. One bent under.”

A slow smile began to spread over Hazel's face, a smile of relieved delight. Then for a moment the shadow of worry came back. “Who you think they'll get instead of me?”

“Nobody knows,” said Fauna.

“Well, he better be good,” said Hazel ominously. And then he abandoned himself to pure relief. “‘I got a little shadow that goes in and out with me,'” he sang.

Fauna rolled up her chart and went home.

Just before noon the expressman picked his unaccustomed way up to the chicken walk to the Palace Flop house.

“I got a great big crate for you guys,” he said. “I ain't got no call to deliver it up a rope ladder. Come on down and get it.”

“It's here!” Mack cried. “God works in his tum-te-dum way his tum-tums to perform.”

Hazel and Whitey No. 1 and Mack were wrestling the big wooden case up the chicken walk when Eddie joined them.

“Suzy come!” he cried. “I come with her. Seemed like she was about to take off any minute. She's in there with him now.”

“Give us a hand,” said Mack. “How's she look?”

“Fireball,” said Eddie.

They carried the case into the Palace and Mack attacked it with a hand ax.

“There she is,” he said when the lid was off.

“She's with Doc. Say, what you got?”

“Look!” said Mack. And he and the boys gazed down on the instrument, the great black tube of an eight-inch reflector, eyepieces socketed beside it, and its tripod cradled.

“Biggest one in the whole damn catalogue,” said Mack proudly. “Jesus, Doc'll be happy! Eddie, tell us everything that happened, don't leave nothing out.”

What a day it was! A day of purple and gold, the proud colors of the Salinas High School. A squadron of baby angels maneuvered at twelve hundred feet, holding a pink cloud on which the word J-O-Y flashed on and off. A seagull with a broken wing took off and flew straight up into the air, squawking, “Joy! Joy!”

Suzy was ahead of her racing feet when Eddie intercepted her. She answered yes and no to Eddie's casual comments on the weather, but not only did she not hear the comments, she didn't know Eddie was beside her.

She went up the steps of Western Biological without seeing Whitey No. 2 standing guard with a sashweight. Her coming relieved him of a duty, but he stuck around to hear.

At the top of the steps Suzy became a breathless, shy girl, and, as anybody knows, there is nothing more indestructible and deadly than a shy young girl. She paused to get her breath and then knocked on the door and went in and forgot to close the door—which was good for Whitey No. 2.

Doc was sitting on his cot gloomily regarding the pile of collecting paraphernalia on the floor.

“I heard you was hurt,” Suzy said gently. “I come to see if there was anything I could do.”

For a moment Doc's face lightened, then gloom descended. “This shoots the spring tides,” he said, staring at the white cast. “I don't know what I'll do.”

“Does it hurt much?” Suzy asked.

“Some. It will hurt more later, I guess.”

“I'll go down to La Jolla with you.”

“And turn over rocks that weigh fifty or a hundred pounds?”

“I ain't put together with spit,” said Suzy.

“Can you drive a car?”

“Sure,” said Suzy.

“You can't do it,” he said. And then, from way down in the deep part of him, there came a bubbling shout, “Sure you can! I need you, Suzy. I need you to go with me. It will be terribly hard work and I'm pretty near helpless.”

“You can tell me what to do and what to look for.”

“Sure I can. And I'm not entirely helpless. I can use my left hand.”

“It's a cinch,” said Suzy. “When do we start?”

“I've got to go to night. If we drive all night we can make the tide at seven-eighteen tomorrow morning. Think you can make it?”

“Cinch,” said Suzy. “If you need me.”

“I need you all right. I'd be lost without you. But you'll be a tired kid.”

“Who cares?” said Suzy.

“I want to ask you something,” said Doc. “Old Jingleballicks has set up a foundation for me at Cal Tech.”

“Why not?”

“I don't have to work there.”

“Fine.”

“I don't know whether I oughtn't to throw it in his face.”

“Why don't you?”

“On the other hand, there's all the wonderful equipment.”

“Fine,” said Suzy.

“I don't like to work for anybody.”

“Give it back.”

“But there's an invitation to read my paper before the Academy of Science.”

“Do it then.”

“I don't know whether I can even write the paper. What shall I do, Suzy?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don't know.”

“What's wrong with that? Say, Doc, I got to do a couple of things. Take me maybe two hours. That too long?”

“Just as long as we start by evening.”

“I'll come back soon's I finish.”

Doc said, “Suzy, I love you.”

She was headed for the door. She whirled and faced him. Her brows were straight and her mouth taut. Then she took a slow breath and her lips became full and turned up at the corners and her eyes shone with incredible excitement.

“Brother,” said Suzy, “you got yourself a girl!”

In the Palace Flop house, Suzy sat on a straight chair surrounded by the boys. She wore a look of furious concentration. Her feet were on two bricks and she held a barrel hoop in her hands. Propped in front of her was a board on which were chalked “ignition key,” “speedometer,” “choke,” and “gas gauge.” On the floor on her right side stood an apple box with a mop handle sticking upright out of it.

“Try her again,” said Mack. “Turn the key and reach up with your right toe for the starter.”

Suzy put her foot on a chalk spot on the floor.

“Chug-a-chug-a-chug,” said Hazel happily.

“Push out your clutch.”

Suzy pushed her left foot down on a brick.

“Now bring the gear to you and back.”

She moved the mop handle to low gear.

“Ease up the gas and let in the clutch. Now clutch out, away from you and forward. Give it gas. Now clutch out and straight back. There, you done it good. Now do it again.”

At the end of an hour and a half Suzy had driven the straight chair roughly a hundred and fifty miles.

“You'll do all right,” said Mack. “Take it slow. If you can get two miles out of town without ramming into something, you can tell him the truth. He ain't going to turn back then. He'll tell you what to do. I'll get her started and kind of lined up with the street.”

“You're a bunch of nice guys,” said Suzy.

“Hell, if Hazel can go to all the trouble to break—oop, sorry—the least we can do is see he gets some good out of it. Come on now—whang her through the gears again!”

The evening was as lovely as the day had been. The setting sun pinked up the little white caps on the bay and lighted the serious pelicans pounding home to the sea rocks. The metal cannery walls seemed a soft and precious platinum.

Doc's old car stood in front of Western Biological, its backseat loaded with buckets and pans and nets and crowbars. All Cannery Row was there. The Patrón had set out pints of Old Tennis Shoes along the curb. Fauna's hair blazed in the setting sun. The girls gave Suzy quick little hugs. Becky was in romantic tears.

Joe Elegant looked out his lean-to door. He thought he would go to Rome after his book was published.

Doc held a list in his hand and checked equipment.

Only Mack and the boys were missing. And here they came down the chicken walk, balancing among them the tripod and the long black tube. They crossed the track and the lot and they set the tripod down beside the automobile.

Mack cleared his throat. “Friends,” he said, “on behalf of I and the boys it gives me plea sure to present Doc with this here.”

Doc looked at the gift—a telescope strong enough to bring the moon to his lap. His mouth fell open. Then he smothered the laughter that rose in him.

“Like it?” said Mack.

“It's beautiful.”

“Biggest one in the whole goddam catalogue,” said Mack.

Doc's voice was choked. “Thanks,” he said. He paused. “After all, I guess it doesn't matter whether you look down or up—as long as you look.”

“We'll put her inside for you,” said Mack. “Give me one of them pints. To Doc!” he cried, and under his breath he whispered to Suzy, “Turn the key. Now, starter.”

The ancient engine roared. Doc was sipping from a pint.

“Clutch out—to you and back,” Mack said. “Let in the clutch.”

Suzy did.

The old car deliberately climbed the curb, ripped off the stairs of Western Biological, careened into the street, and crawled away, scattering lumber as it went.

Doc turned in the seat and looked back. The disappearing sun shone on his laughing face, his gay and eager face. With his left hand he held the bucking steering wheel.

Cannery Row looked after the ancient car. It made the first turn and was gone from sight behind a ware house just as the sun was gone.

Fauna said, “I wonder if I'd be safe to put up her gold star tonight. What the hell's the matter with you, Mack?”

Mack said, “Vice is a monster so frightful of mien, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.” He put his arm around Hazel's shoulders. “I think you'd of made a hell of a president,” he said.