Vital Parts (24 page)

“I wish I could.” Eunice squeezed the plastic container of mustard, shaped like a tube of house-caulking, stercoraceously encrusted at the nozzle. The one for catsup was a big red replica of a tomato, smeared with maroon. Reinhart flicked away some spilled sugar and put his forearms down. He hadn't got rid of it all and felt a sandy grating.

“I guess your complaint is that he doesn't understand you,” he said. “Same old story. Nothing new today except that everybody's more vocal. I wonder if that's a gain? I'm pretty tired of propaganda from any side. I wonder if life really should not be hopeless as a condition of normalcy.” He wondered if that was really what he meant.

“Bob got custody of me. My mother lives in Hungary. She ran away with a defector during the Cold War—actually, by the old definition, a traitor. He was a rocket engineer.” Eunice looked bored. “Bob is a fascist. He is connected with the military-industrial complex. The CIA subsidizes the Cryon Foundation.”

“I thought they pulled out of that sort of thing.”

“Well, they
would
subsidize it if they were still doing it. Hey, I forgot to order potato chips.”

“No, you didn't,” Reinhart said. “Oh no, that was French fries.”

“I want them both.”

How infantile she was.

She screamed and pounded on the table, and in fear he said: “OK, OK.”

She asked: “Do you think I'm putting you on?”

Reinhart had a burst of inspiration. “Only when you cry,” he said.

She was staring into his eyes. “I dig you,” she said.

This embarrassed him, of course. What he actually wanted was not to be here at all, to twist a magic ring and wake up somewhere else. Reinhart took no position on the question of Shakespeare's identity, but he did hold with the theory that fatso Hamlet spoke literally in wishing his too solid flesh would resolve itself into a dew.

Eunice still stared admiringly or perhaps merely nearsightedly at him. She apparently expected something. He turned his head away and pawed the ground in a shit-kicking maneuver. And then it was he saw his son.

Blaine was moving amid a unisex group settling into a booth across the room. The light was poor but Reinhart would know him anywhere now with that plucked head. With the naked neck he resembled a baby vulture. Reinhart blew out his and Eunice's candle. “Fire upsets me,” he said. “With its mindless consumption. Out, I say, out, brief candle.”

“You're out of sight,” Eunice said with unwitting sense. The young-bodied waitress with the old face swooped in and slid their dishes to them: two Stomach Steak sandwiches on dead-white, gummy-textured bread. French fries. Two large Cokes. Eunice squeezed a flood of catsup over every available surface. Reinhart salted down his meat and, taking a bite, identified it as more or less uniform cartilage. Eunice was chomping away, her eyes crossing with every bite.

Reinhart stole a look at Blaine from behind the decorative flange that made the booth round-shouldered. As bad luck would have it, his son sat on the outside of the party and persons had suddenly ceased to walk between them. Fate had arranged a clear field of vision. Blaine might glance across at any moment. The nearest wall bulbs were close enough to illuminate Reinhart but too far away to extinguish unobtrusively. Reinhart was within his rights to be here and with a female friend. Blaine's mother after all had thrown him out of the house. Yet no father likes a son to catch him with a strange woman. Something deeper in this than loyalty to wife and mother, bearing emotional similarity perhaps to one's distaste to be seen in the nude by his offspring. When Blaine was ten or twelve years younger he used to burst in on Reinhart in the bathtub and grin inscrutably.

The other reason Reinhart had for now wishing to avoid him was more generous: this was Blaine's kind of place and his father did not wish to infringe upon his privacy in it. In truth he did not want to know Blaine out of the house. They were not the kind of people who, had they not been related, would have been friends. This had been true in all of Reinhart's familial arrangements since birth.

When Reinhart next saw Eunice's plate only a smear of red marked where her food had been.

She followed his eyes and said: “That's the way I am. I might not eat again for twenty-four hours.” Swallowed the rest of her Coke in a rush of chipped ice.

Reinhart pushed his plate away. “Turns out I am off my feed,” he said. “Let's get the check and blow.”

Growing more self-congratulatory than ever, she shook all of her hair and stared arrogantly around the room. At least the type of woman who was overfond of her own vivacity had not vanished.

If Reinhart had correctly sized up that little waitress he would never see her again without a heroic search. By nature he was suited for the kind of restaurant depicted in the old drawing-room comedies he admired, the obsequiously attendant maître d'hôtel in the dinner jacket, et al., but had lived his life in hashhouses with indifferent if not insolent help. Even now with Sweet's fifty clams in the kitty and backed up by Maw's five grand on deposit. He could have dined at L'Etable de Cochons, where local debutantes were always being feted. Well, next time.

Thinking which he realized that all in all, and in a weird way, he was enjoying the company of Eunice. Bob had no doubt trusted him to keep her out of trouble, while the nympho talk was designed to maintain his interest. Sooner or later Reinhart found that sense still reigned, back of puzzling façades. People were basically the same as ever. They just said more today.

Eunice cried: “Hey, I see somebody I know.” She slid from the booth and started across towards Blaine, of course, and Reinhart's fat was in the fire.

So came he to hide in the toilet, having got there in a wounded animal progress which however seemed to attract no attention from the crowd of young persons oblivious to all but their own costumes. But two of those karate-clad attendants were inside the men's room, and he abruptly straightened up.

“It was the roundhouse kick,” one was saying. “Perfect focus. Then a
shuto
to the neck, quick turn and—”

“Did they allow contact?” asked the other.

“Not to the face, but none of the lower belts had any control and were slaughtering one another.”

“How'd the trophies look?”

“Cheap. It was a crappy tournament. But the demonstrations were good. You know Hojiwara?”

“The
sensei
at the Midtown Y?”

“He blocked arrows shot at him. Then broke five boards with a
nukite
. That shook up Kim, you know, the Korean who has his own
dojo?
He was sitting there sneering. He can break eight boards with a
shuto
or
empi
or five with his head, but when Hojiwara went through them with his fingertips Kim like to shit.”

Reinhart, standing at a stall, loosened his belt with the other hand. He had either got fatter, while eating virtually nothing all day, or was bloated with emptiness. It had been years since he was able to see his member in that stance. He still thought of the Japs as enemies in the late war. Funny how their hand-to-hand techniques were now popular. The old movies always showed a little treacherous slant-eyed judo man being eventually defeated by the honest one-two of the brawny American boxer with the Irish face.

As he rinsed his hands the karate men left and an old-fashioned-looking young fellow entered, wearing an Ivy League sack suit, regimental tie, black wingtip shoes, short sideburns. Reinhart was delighted to see an example of a type he had supposed to be deplorably dead. Clean-cut chap, neat to a fault. Washed a pair of already impeccable hands, scornfully eschewed the stained roller towel, and dried them on a very white breast-pocket handkerchief.

Reinhart cautiously opened the toilet door and, peeping out, saw an oncoming Blaine within ten feet. He backtracked rapidly into a booth and, locking it, crouched there. He heard the rush of air as his son entered.

“Hi, man,” said Blaine's voice.

Nobody else was available but the Ivy League type, and therefore it had to be he who replied: “Five.”

“Shit, man, that's high.”

“Gimme the bread or fuck off.”

‘I'm not saying I won't,” said Blaine. A rustle. Reinhart essayed a look over the door of the booth. He saw the back of Blaine's head and half the Ivy League face with a white parting of hair and one hazel eye. Which, flickering, saw him. The suited youth pushed Blaine violently. “You fink bastard,” he said. “I thought that slob looked like a bull.” Blaine's back struck the door in front of Reinhart, who now had hooked his chin over it and got a vibration in his Adam's apple.

Ivy League dashed for the exit, but the returning karate men appeared when he had a yard still to go. They wore those Nipponese rubber sandals.

“Wait a minute, you guys!”

“I thought we warned you a couple times,” said one bouncer. He extended his right foot behind him and bent his left knee. The well-dressed fellow shuffled backwards.

“Come on, you guys, I got the message.”

The bouncer pursued him in a strange dragging walk, in which his erect trunk and horizontal shoulder line did not alter. His fists were closed and held against the body, one high and one low.

“You won't do it to me again,” said the Ivy Leaguer. He brought a knife from the flapped pocket of his pinstriped jacket, switching open the blade en route.

His inexorable pursuer took another gliding step, remaining noncommittal, but the other bouncer smiled radiantly. He took from his belt two slender sticks joined top to top by eight inches of cord. Holding one, whirling the other through the air in a lateral figure-of-eight, he enveloped the thrusting knife in an abstract design of motion terminating in a soft report as the rod struck the wrist. The knife fell skittering on the concrete.

Blaine's back was heaving against the booth. Behind it his father took the emergency measure that had always served him at moments of violence: absolute paralysis. Only the eyeballs moved. If you are good enough at it you will be taken for a boulder and go unnoticed.

“You don't learn,” said the bouncer in the stylized stance. “You just don't learn.”

“Then call the bulls. There's one in the toilet. Help me, man!” cried the fellow in the natural-shouldered suit, staring at Reinhart's face. “I got my rights to protection.” His eyes definitely showed anguish. He was rather pathetic, as any creature at bay.

“You peddle shit in here and you pull a concealed weapon. Man, I don't know what you could be thinking of,” said the praying-mantis bouncer with a kind of gleeful regret. Then he kicked him once high in the vest and when the head bowed over he caught the chin on an upthrust elbow and the groin on a lifting knee. As the victim descended from this assault he was struck at least thrice by blurred fists on snapping wrists. When he lay upon the floor the security-man leaped onto his face.

The other bouncer turned to look at Blaine, who quickly threw him two wispy cigarettes and, crossing his arms and compressing his chin, sank to the concrete and made himself into an unresistant ball.

“Don't you want to see my flying kick?” asked the disappointed enforcer. He waded over Blaine and handed Reinhart the reefers, as they were once termed.

Reinhart shook his head. “I'm not a cop. I'm just a patron.”

So the other bouncer went through the pockets of the recumbent pusher, found a lighter, and the two lit up. Reinhart thought it amazing that athletes would smoke marijuana. He sat down on the closed toilet, from which situation he could see part of Blaine's body under the door.

Before long the bouncers' trade-talk conversation went out of the men's room. Blaine stirred and became a pair of feet in the familiar boots of reversed cowhide. Reinhart rose and peeped out. Blaine was searching the unconscious pusher. But he seemed to find nothing and left without a glance towards the booth. He was wearing a blue military tunic with black frogs. How easily the young passed through experiences nowadays.

Two other costumed youths came in, had a piss, and left, oblivious to the fallen. At last Reinhart stepped out, ran some water into cupped hands, and threw it into the gory face of the man on the floor. After an instant of tentative awakening, the victim groaned, flung his arms out dramatically, and after a single convulsive jerk seemed to die. Reinhart kneeled and was on the point of some test of vitality, rolling back an eyelid or the like, when the pusher struck him violently, leaped half-erect, and dashed out the door.

End of episode. When Reinhart emerged from the men's room his presence was still unknown to Blaine, but he no longer cared. His son buying marijuana. But actually that bothered him less than Blaine's demonstrated ability to handle himself under stress. He had never learned that from his old man. It made Reinhart feel very rotten indeed, totally useless. He might otherwise have come to Blaine's aid, and both of them would have been beaten savagely and thus reunited in blood. Such sentimental speculations had gone through Reinhart's head in that instant in which the bouncer had advanced on Blaine, as well as the normal disinclination to get hurt.

Blaine certainly lived in a different world, which Reinhart contrasted not to his own current one but that of his own teens and early twenties. There had been then quite as much violence, but it seemed to have more effect.

The pusher apparently was an old hand at being punished by these karate men, and, for their side, they did not have him arrested. The performance would no doubt be repeated soon again. Why were none of the principals bored?

Over the P.A. system continued the same tune that had begun when Reinhart and Eunice had entered the Gastrointestinal System. The lead Chancre was still screaming: “Oh babeh I will tell you …” How long could they keep that up? Not only the Chancres, who no doubt by design did not seem true persons, but the other people, these organisms in human form. When Reinhart was younger he had sought control over experience, basic to which was an escape from imposed rituals, like church, rigid political credos, and social biases. The object was not to repeat anything compulsively.