The Fires of Spring (16 page)

Max Volo took David’s escape from the loganberry stand philosophically. He apparently bore no grudge, for early in David’s tenure at the second-fare platform Max appeared clothed in mysteriousness. “It’s sensational!” he whispered.

“What is?” David asked suspiciously.

“The bell!” Max replied cryptically.

“What bell?”

“It’s like this,” Max explained enthusiastically. “You wear this bell under your shirt, and it ain’t no ordinary bell. A man who works for the company that makes your fare bell slips me this special one on the side.”

“What’s this all about?” David demanded.

“Like I said!” Max wheezed. “Under your shirt is this bell. You ring it with your elbow and pocket the fare. Nobody can tell the difference.” The little man beamed at David.

“I don’t want your bell,” David said.

“Look!” Max explained. He flicked his elbow imperceptibly and a sound exactly like David’s fare bell sounded. “I pay the guy fifty bucks to give me this. I let you have it for seventy-five. In a month you could knock off five hundred dollars!”

“No!” David exploded.

“OK,” Max agreed promptly. “You think that’s too risky. I got another angle. I know the spotter who works your beat. For twenty bucks a week I tip you off. Why, you could palm fares so fast nobody could see you.”

David was disgusted. “Get the hell out of here, Max!” he exploded.

“Sure!” the little man said. “But I think you’d like this!” He whisked before David’s startled eyes a glossy photograph of Nora, completely undressed and smiling at the camera. Max moved the picture just slowly enough for David to see clearly and indelibly what the picture was. “Costs only two bucks,” Max whispered.

Three thoughts flashed through David’s mind in that fragmentary moment. “I could beat this guy up,” he thought at first. Then as the exquisite thrill of the picture took effect he thought: “I’d like to have that.” And instantly he thought: “Nora! She’s a good kid.” He shared none of his thoughts with Volo, who stared at the boy, sighed heavily, and walked away.

David saw Nora several times after that, but not at the Coal Mine. He saw her sidling through the Park, walking aimlessly until some young man picked her up. Then she insisted upon riding the Hurricane. Thin, tense, her lips white with fear, she swept through the heights and dizzy depths of the wild ride. When the car stopped at David’s platform she stepped out, dazed. Then, clenching her fists, she would take a deep breath and smile at David before she disappeared with her young man toward the Coal Mine.

Occasionally she would ride alone, sitting by herself in a corner of the car, trembling violently when the mad dash was over. “What do you ride for if you’re so scared?” David asked her one day.

“You gotta do something,” she joked.

“Want another one?” he asked.

“With you? Sure!” He tossed his register to a brakeman and jumped in beside the shivering girl. Then, far above Paradise; he and Nora clung to each other and surveyed the tawdry land below them, the crooks, the whorehouse beneath the Coal Mine, the spotters, and the thieves. The car dipped wildly, and Nora shrieked. David did not try to kiss her or clutch at her dress, and as the car reached the long, slow dip before the platform, Nora gripped his hand and whispered, “You’re the best kid in the Park!”

She returned often to the Hurricane and told David that if he ever wanted to revisit the room beneath the waterfall he could. “You’re a big boy now. You know what goes on down there, but I guess you don’t wanta be mixed up in it, do you? Well, you’re smart, but if you ever want to come down, we can have a good time. Just kissing and stuff like that. Not like Max and Betty.” David usually took her to dinner on such days, and they ate hog dogs with sauerkraut.

“Max showed me your picture,” David said one evening as they ate.

“You mean?” She flicked her fingers down the front of her dress.

“Yes,” David replied, his voice choked with excitement.

“I’m skinny, ain’t I?” she teased.

“You’re a sweet girl!” he avowed passionately.

“Sure I am,” she said softly, piling more sauerkraut on her hot dog. “Only I got some bad breaks. But I got some good ones, too. Right now a gentleman wants to marry me. Only he’s a Polack. Achh!” She spit into the gravel. “You’d never catch me marryin’ a Polack. They beat their women somethin’ awful.” She looked at David with deep, flashing eyes. “I’d never marry a guy who beat his wife. I’d kill him, that’s what.”

One night Mr. Stone saw David talking with Nora and after the little prostitute had gone, the gray cashier said, “I suppose you know who she is.”

“Yes,” David said, not certain that he did know.

“I suppose you know that she’s one of the girls Max Volo keeps in the Coal Mine? He rents them out. To anybody who wants them. Have you been fooling around there?” David did not reply, and the older man asked sharply, “How much do you know, kid?”

“Oh, I know!” David said bravely.

“Well, do you know this?” Mr. Stone asked forcefully. In ten minutes he told David more than Old Daniel had been able to explain in an hour and a half. They stood beneath a carrousel shed, where the waltz from
Faust
played on and on, mixed with the unfeeling words of Mr. Stone as he described what David’s future would be if he caught certain diseases.

David was shocked and bewildered. He had guessed much of what Mr. Stone was saying, but he had not known, for sure. When the icy lecture ended he was badly confused. He wanted to believe that sex was the solemn, grandiose thing Old Daniel had said. But he also knew from what he had seen beneath the Coal Mine—especially from things Nora started to say but couldn’t—that sex was also the brutal, retributive thing that Mr. Stone claimed. David never entirely reconciled these two views of life, in which respect he was exactly like most men who live, including Old Daniel and Mr. Stone.

As a reward for the boy’s honesty, Mr. Stone taught him the master tricks of short-changing. “Some men like talcum powder best, but I prefer pumice,” the precise, gray cashier explained. “Run your hand over my board. Smooth as glass, eh? Now watch!” With his left middle finger Mr. Stone
deftly slid a dime across the polished change board. The coin came to rest exactly where a customer could not see it. “That’s what pumice does!”

“Wouldn’t talcum do as well?” David inquired.

“Better, sometimes, but you’ll notice that we’re close to the lake. The humidity makes talcum gum up. Always stick to pumice.” He produced a cotton bag filled with dust and patiently polished his board. Then he flipped a few nickels and dimes across it, laying them where they could not be seen.

“There’s one idea to master,” he continued. “A customer is a hand, and a voice, and an eye. He lays his money down. That’s the hand. He says, ‘Two,’ and that’s the voice. But it’s his eye that you have to work on. So here’s how to do it. As soon as he speaks, have the tickets out there for him. Put them so he’ll have to move forward to get them, and that carries him past his change.”

Mr. Stone stopped and looked at David. “How tough are you, kid?” he asked.

“I’m pretty tough,” David replied.

“Short-changing is a test of whether you’re tougher than the customer. Because you’ve got to judge the next second. Is the yokel going to leave? If you make a single move, he’ll remember his change. So you watch his coat sleeve like a hawk, and that’s when you’ve got to be tough. Outlast him. Out-brazen him. But you’ve got to do it in the flash of a second, because the minute he hesitates, you shove part of his change at him, in the direction he’s moving. The part you want to keep you shove way back over here.”

With beautiful gestures Mr. Stone showed David exactly how to work: “Tickets way over here. The pause. Then a quarter and some dimes right beside the tickets. A quarter and a nickel way back here.” David could not detect a single variation in the cashier’s movements.

“You certainly do it smoothly,” David said admiringly.

“Some cashiers don’t like that left-hand trick of mine,” Mr. Stone explained.

“I see why,” David agreed. “Your left hand slides the money you want to keep right into the face of the next person in line. Then it’s the next guy who messes up the deal by shouting, ‘Mister! You forgot your change.’ That’s what happened to me at the loganberry stand.”

“There’s a way to beat that,” Mr. Stone explained. “See that sign?” David left the booth and studied the traditional Park sign that ran across the front of the bars:
COUNT YOUR
CHANGE
. In front of the word
COUNT
Mr. Stone had erected an immense sign with the single word
PLEASE
. He had placed it so precisely that people waiting to buy tickets could not see the spot on his change board where the errant coins lay hidden.

“It cuts off people’s faces,” David said. “How can you see them?”

“Ah!” Mr. Stone cried, “that’s the beauty of it. If you really go into this business, you never look at people’s faces. Remember what I said: a hand, a voice, an eye. That’s all. You short-change everybody. You don’t try to guess who you can ream and who you can’t. You ream them all. Then you’re in the big time.”

“How about women?” David asked.

“They’re people, aren’t they?” Mr. Stone countered.

The day finally came when David was permitted to sit in Mr. Stone’s chair and try his skill; but he was most maladroit, and soon he had a line of customers arguing about their change, and in his confusion he slid out more coins than he should have. Mr. Stone watched in amusement for some time and then took over. “You can’t expect to be a champion in one day. Tell you what! You come to work early and practice on my board. But remember! Never look at a sucker’s face. You felt sorry for those yokels and lost your shirt.”

Frequently thereafter Mr. Stone allowed David to try his hand. In time the boy became fairly skilled at the dirty business, and to his great surprise he was informed one morning that he would henceforth be cashier at the third largest concession in the Park, the Coal Mine! He erected his sign,
PLEASE COUNT YOUR CHANGE
, and polished his board with pumice. He spent hours each day flipping coins idly, speedily, purposefully across his shimmering board and discovered one evening that he had become psychologically tough enough to outbrazen the yokels. He tried to cheat every customer, never looked at their faces, was icily undisturbed when they insisted on their right change, and made at least $50.00 a week.

“You’ve learned a lot this summer,” Mr. Stone said admiringly on the last night. “But the biggest thing you learned was to play the game honestly. Don’t ever fool around with men like Max Volo.” Side by side, in warm friendship, David and Mr. Stone left the Park. It was a cold night in September,
and the lights went out for the last time that year. The wind was midnight chill, and there was a grand loneliness in the air.

“You were very kind to me,” David said impulsively as they reached the trolley line.

“See you next summer, kid!” Mr. Stone said impassively. “You’re all right, kid. You got a good head on your shoulders.” He waved goodbye and disappeared. Funny, but David did not know where Mr. Stone lived. Somewhere near Philadelphia. He didn’t work in the winter but went down to Florida for a rest.

David stood thinking of Mr. Stone when he felt a soft push in the middle of his back. “Guess who?” a thin voice teased. It was Nora!

“I was wondering about you,” he said.

“Don’t you worry about me,” she replied.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“There’s a man wants to take me down to Florida,” she replied.

“Are you getting married?” David asked, his voice betraying his disappointment.

“Oh, no!” the thin girl explained. “This guy’s in his fifties. He came to arrange it with Max.”

“Are you going?” David asked.

“I guess so,” she said. She pulled a very thin coat about her shoulders, and David was perplexed as to what he should say next. He was glad she wasn’t getting married, and at the same time he was unhappy about her going to Florida with a man of fifty. Yet he liked the idea of her going south for the winter.

“I don’t know what to say!” he admitted. Nora smiled at him and clasped his hand. His blood began to circulate furiously.

“Don’t you say anything,” she whispered. “I know what you’re thinking.”

But he did say something. He said a very foolish thing. “That’s the only coat you have, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, here!” Impulsively he handed her fifty dollars which that night would have been hidden in the poorhouse barn. She pushed the money back at him.

“If I go to Florida my man’ll buy me all the clothes I want,” she explained.

“All right,” David said. “Then you take this for yourself.”
He thrust the money into the ragged pocket of her thin coat, and as he did so she clutched him by the arm and they stepped back among the shadows that now possessed the Park. She held her warm lips up to his and placed his hands upon her body.

“Oh, kid!” she whispered. “Let’s just stand here for a minute.” She pressed herself against him and moved her body slowly. “Does that feel good?” she whispered hoarsely. David could only mumble and she gripped him by the shoulders, pushing him away. She spoke very quickly: “First time we met you told me you had a girl. You go home and be very nice to her. You kiss her and do all sorts of things with her.” She hurried David back onto the graveled walk, but when the time came to say good night she stood very straight before him, her breasts projecting toward him, and she said with great force, “Next year you’ll be old enough, Dave. The time we’ll have!”

Nora kissed him one last long time and then disappeared toward the Philadelphia trolleys. He watched the strange manner in which darkness folds about the body of a retreating woman, and long after she had gone that darkness seemed still to contain her. She was the first of the nameless people he was to know. She had no family, and no one cared where she went or when she lay down to sleep. A succession of cheap rooms formed her home, and she had a mind that no one had ever cared to cultivate. Sometimes in the winter when she was sick, she lay for days in dirty sheets until the fever wore itself out, and in the warmer summers she slept with many men. She was nobody, and she had no nationality. She was not French nor Polish nor Italian … some indiscriminate race that retained long names which people in America could not pronounce. David did not know her name, nor where she lived, nor could he write to her; yet this strange, nameless thing was David’s first girl, and her departing promise of a great time next summer haunted him for seven months.