The Fires of Spring (46 page)

“Who’s Hargreaves?” he demanded sharply. The elderly actor stepped forward and Max grabbed him by the shirt. “I want to talk to you!” he said. With three of his henchmen helping he dragged Cyril into the shadows. They conversed seriously for several minutes and Volo cried, “I’ll be damned if he does!” Whereupon he stormed back to the dressing rooms and cried to his gang, pointing at David, “Get that sonofabitch!”

Two men dragged David past the marionette boxes. A third slugged him from behind, so that his neck seemed about to break. “Wild Man!” he shouted, but it was no use. Jensen was absent in the truck and the tent captain was in jail. Quietly, and with maximum efficiency, Volo’s thugs administered a masterful beating.

“No snotnose college kid’s goin’ to make a sucker out of me!” Volo said through tight lips, standing apart as his men finished their work. A big boxer shot four blows to David’s face. The third smash knocked his jaw loose. The fourth knocked it back the other way. Then he was allowed to fall into the dust and hay. The long, expensive car squealed in the night, and Volo’s gang resumed its way to New York.

The curtain was delayed half an hour. Jensen was switched to David’s part and Cyril, calm and possessed, handled the Wild Man’s original lines via the telephone. David lay propped up in the men’s dressing room. Whenever she was offstage the Gonoph nursed him. She cried when the Slaghill doctor said it was a miracle the jaw wasn’t broken. “It’ll be painful for two more days, but you should be able to eat by then,” the white-haired man said.

“How soon can I act?” David asked through clenched teeth.

“Soon as the swelling goes down,” the doctor said. “Little make-up on that eye and you’ll be OK.” He had a breezy manner and gave David a sedative. “Two days you’ll be fine!” He stayed to see the play and gave the Gonoph additional instructions when she pestered him.

Neither Cyril nor Mona spoke to David about his beating. The tall actor dressed in his corner of the canvas dressing room and said, “You were admirable tonight, Mr. Jensen.” Then he went to the areaway and called, “Miss Meigs! Miss Clews! Stop!”

Apparently the Gonoph and Mona had been fighting, for David, his head throbbing, heard the former cry, “You cheap alley cat!” She refused to ride with Cyril and Mona. “I’d rather walk!” she shouted contemptuously with more feeling than she had ever crammed into a stage line.

Puffing heavily, she climbed into the truck with David. “You ride up front with Mr. Jensen,” she told Vito. David was drowsy from the sedative given him by the Slaghill doctor and he understood only part of what the Gonoph told him in the darkness of the truck. He got the sentences: “Lord Cyril, the dirty bastard, told that little man you were with Mona all the time. I caught the slimy old devil smiling to himself after they beat you up.”

David wished the ugly woman would go away and let him sleep. Drowsily he turned on his hard bed, but the movement made him wince with pain. The Gonoph banged on the window. “Drive slower!” she commanded, and then she sat on David’s bed. She took his aching head in her hands, but he drew away, hating this fat woman.

But the gesture made his head ache dreadfully, down where the lower jaw joined the skull. “Ughhhh,” he grunted, and this sound of pain was more than the Gonoph could bear. Against David’s will she cradled his sore face in her soft arms, pressed his bruised head against her fabulous bosom. “Oh, David! David!” she chanted. “You are my one heart’s desire.”

The whole experience was sickening to David and again he tried to move away, but the combined action of pain and the sedative was too much for him. He fell back in her arms and moaned, “God! I feel awful.”

The Gonoph sat with him until he fell asleep. Jensen drove slowly and Vito dozed on the front seat. Toward morning
Jensen looked back to see how David was, and he saw the Gonoph rocking back and forth, her eyes closed.

“Well!” the Gonoph announced some days later. “Everything’s all right again. Grand Duke Cyril himself got into bed with her last night.”

“Shut up!” David shouted. “Get the hell away from me!” He pushed her out of the tent and resumed packing the dolls. When she returned she was carrying a bag of jelly beans. He refused to take them and shouted, “Leave me alone!” She went to the women’s dressing room and sat on a bench, staring at him as he worked, but he would not let her come near him. “Why don’t you go for a walk?” he snapped.

Even though David had acknowledged to himself that sexual love is not the prerogative of youth—as most young people suppose—he was shocked that a graceless woman like the Gonoph should actually be in love in a breathless, panting sort of way. And he was repulsed by the thought of old Mr. Hargreaves presuming to sleep with a girl as beautiful as Mona. Suddenly he thought of his math professor, Tschilczynski. “When he married the Greek widow, I thought it was because he wanted someone to cook for him. Gosh! Imagine those two actually sleeping together in bed. It’s repulsive!” But when he recalled the Russian’s passionate nature he realized that it had been the sexual part of marriage that had inspired the wedding.

Normally David would have sought counsel from Wild Man Jensen, but he had not spoken to the athlete since the fight with Volo’s gang. The cause of his disaffection was ridiculous, and David admitted that fact to himself, but when he had sat with ice about his bruised jaw he had listened to the Wild Man usurp his place on the stage. And the big clown had been much better in the role than David had ever been. He was freer, less affected, and more outgiving. David, sulking with his dislocated jaw, suffered the exquisite pain of overhearing Mona and Mr. Hargreaves saying, “We should have used Jensen in that part in the first place!”

So, following the beating in Slaghill, David found himself alienated from the players of Cyril Hargreaves Broadway Troupe. He loathed the Gonoph. He was jealous of Jensen. Mona looked past him as if he did not exist, and he had fallen into a kind of little-boy correctness in his dealings with Cyril. Only Vito remained as before, and David was so acutely aware of the dwarf’s unsatiated longings that he
felt self-conscious near the little man. But it was Vito who dragged David back into the center of the Cyril Hargreaves Troupe, because early one morning David found a perfect pigeon, forty inches high.

He discovered her in Punxsutawney, Pa. He saw her standing in front of a bakery and he jammed on the brakes so that he could get a better look. Jensen and Vito were sleeping in the rear and their heads banged. “What gives?” the Wild Man cried.

“Checking the oil,” David explained, and he slipped out of the truck and asked a man, “Who’s that little girl?”

“That’s Ed Fletcher’s daughter. Real estate.”

“How old is she?”

“Say! You’re nosy! She’s twenty and she’s a dwarf.”

“Ed Fletcher. Ed Fletcher,” David said, and he drove to the next town.

But when the puppet show was unloaded he slipped off to a telephone and asked the operator to get him Ed Fletcher, a real-estate man, in Punxsutawney. During the wait David heard the operators repeating his request, and he became actually frightened. “What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself in astonishment. He was about to hang up and run away from the phone when he heard a professionally hearty voice say, “Ye—sss! Ed speaking!”

“This is going to sound silly as the devil, Mr. Fletcher,” David began. “But I’m Dave Harper. I’m from Dedham, Pennsylvania, and I’m an actor on Chautauqua.”

“Ye—sss, Mr. Harper. What can I do for you?”

“I’m in Kittanning …” There was a long pause.

“Ye—sss, Mr. Harper.”

“This morning I saw your daughter …” There was an agonizing pause and then David rushed his words. “The man who runs our puppet show is forty-one inches high. He’s the finest man I’ve ever known, Mr. Fletcher, and I want him to meet your daughter. I’ll drive back right away if you say the word, so you can see who I am. This is very important.”

Now the pause came from Punxsutawney. David was afraid Mr. Fletcher might hang up, but after an endless moment the voice resumed. “We—Ill, Mr. Harper …”

“I could drive back right now!” David pleaded.

“Why don’t you do that?” the voice said quite solemnly.

David rushed back to the tent and found Vito. “When
I got beat up,” he began, “you handled the show fine. By yourself. Could you do it once more? This afternoon?”

“Sure,” Vito said. “What’s up?”

“Do we have any of those folders left about the play?” David countered. He rummaged in the truck and found one. Stuffing it in his pocket, he wheeled the truck about and hastened back to Punxsutawney.

He was sweating badly when he met Mr. Fletcher, and the real-estate man was equally nervous. “I’m David Harper. This is my driver’s license.” There was a moment of embarrassed introduction and then David produced the folder. “This is Vito Bellotti,” he said. “He has a good job and makes a decent living.”

Mr. Fletcher took the crumpled paper and looked at it for a long time. “Why don’t we drive out to the house?” he suggested. He called his wife and said, “I’m bringing a young man out for a short visit. Can you fix some cakes and milk?” Then he laughed nervously and said, to David, “Of course, you being an actor, you’d probably prefer beer.”

“Oh, no!” David laughed uneasily. “Milk’s OK for me.”

Punxsutawney was a little town, but Mr. Fletcher turned at several corners, and each time David felt sweat break out upon his arms, for he had no idea what he was to say. Finally the car stopped and Mr. Fletcher said, “Well! Here we are!” He led David up a studiously winding flagstone path to where a woman in a white-and-blue apron waited at the door. “This is Mr. David Harper,” Mr. Fletcher said. “He’s an actor.”

They went inside and David peered quickly through each room to look for the little girl, but she was not there. “Some refreshment?” Mrs. Fletcher asked, and David knew from her nervousness that she had been told the purpose of his visit. Then his mouth went completely dry as Mrs. Fletcher listened and said, “That sounds like Betty coming now!”

A door closed and there was an echo of small feet. Then Betty appeared. She was forty inches high and weighed about eighty pounds. She had a pleasant face correctly proportioned for her body, and her eyes were bright and happy. She went directly to David and held out her small hand. “You’re David Harper!” she said. “It was good of you to come all the way back here on my account.” She smiled graciously and asked him to be seated, so that it was no trouble at all for him to say, “I thought it would be good
if you and your parents could be my guests at the play tonight.”

On the trip back to Kittanning, she rode in the truck with David, and her parents followed in the Fletcher car. David was at ease with Betty and joked with her, and even when he saw the brown tent and knew that soon he must introduce her to Vito, he was not afraid, for he sensed that all her life Betty’s sensible parents had taught her not to be worried about her size. But at the critical moment when the truck actually stopped and his hands fell from the wheel, the back of his knees began to sweat furiously, and he saw that Betty was twisting her handkerchief.

Then Jensen appeared and David bellowed, “Hey! Wild Man! Come over here!”

The rugged football player stopped and turned toward the truck. At first he did not see Betty, but when he realized what kind of girl sat beside David he walked slowly over and opened the door. He studied her as if she were a painting of a grand lady, long dead, and a look of immense approval came over his face. “She’s beautiful!” he cried, as if she were not a living girl. Then he let out a roar: “Vito! My God! Come here!”

That night, after the play, the Fletchers insisted that everyone drive back to Punxsutawney for a celebration. Vito rode in the car with little Betty. They made a fine pair, like dolls beside a clock in a Frenchwoman’s boudoir. David rode in the truck with Jensen. They were silent for the first few miles and then Jensen, tired of the silly antagonism that had eaten David, said, “Looks like you beat me to the finish. She’s some little pigeon!”

“You know what I bet?” David asked. “I bet he marries her!”

“He’s a fool if he don’t!” the Wild Man replied. “But we got to arrange something!” Jensen added. “Come life or death. Dave, that little Eyetalian midget must not drive down to Johnstown with us tonight. You understand?”

They shook hands, and at the party Jensen started at once to build Vito’s reputation as a solid citizen. Jensen offered Mr. Fletcher a cigar, patting him condescendingly on the shoulder. “Looks as if you invested in Commonwealth and Southern!” the Wild Man said.

Mr. Fletcher blushed. “Well, sir, as a matter of fact I do have a few shares.”

“I play around with it a little myself,” Jensen confided. “A sheet to windward.”

Mr. Fletcher looked at him strangely, as if trying to untangle that last phrase, whereupon Jensen added, “Sort of like Mr. Bellotti’s father.” This time Vito looked up in astonishment. “Yes,” Jensen mused expansively, “Mr. Bellotti’s father was a wealthy man in Sicily. But he had a great love for democracy. And that’s what got him into trouble with the Black Hand.” He snarled a bit. “It was in nineteen-and-three. Had to fly the country.”

“What was the matter?” Mr. Fletcher asked.

Jensen hesitated to see if Vito wished to carry on the tale, but the dwarf was sitting with his mouth open. “He was the leader of the democratic forces,” the Wild Man explained.

“I thought the Black Hand wanted democracy,” Mrs. Fletcher said.

“Politics!” Jensen replied, cryptically. Then he changed the subject. “What did you think of Mr. Bellotti’s voice?” he asked. “D below B to F above C.”

Mrs. Fletcher played the piano. “How’s that?” she asked.

Jensen pounded himself on the chest. “Very low voice,” he said. And the action reminded him of his greatest parlor trick. David, sensing this, gasped.

“Mr. Fletcher!” the Wild Man asked impulsively, “Have you ever seen a man practically burn himself to death?”

“No! Jensen!” David cried. “Mr. Fletcher! Don’t let him do it!”

But before anyone could stop him the Wild Man peeled off his shirt. He stood before the party bare to his waist, displaying an immense chestful of black and tangled hair. “You got a seltzer bottle?” he asked. He handed it to David. “He’s my fire department!” he explained.