Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde (24 page)

It was a new thrill for Madge. A new love. A new kick out of life. It was like her first memory of mass, the first purple wonder, the deep dark purple of something holy with fire. (As he gave the whore the sense of religion, his brother was negating it in Cathy.) He was her swell guy. Gee, she was lucky to have him. He was worth a million.

He took a drink of gin, sharing the glass. They went to bed, the aura of the strange minute vanishing from their passion. After, he’d fallen asleep. Later rousing himself to stare from one elbow’s height at her sleeping faun body, he forgot altogether, pressing his body down, his mouth on her lips feeling a joy from God, but not like that other greater joy. His breath was foul from gin and the exhaling odors of the flesh. This love perspired. Their mouths were flat. It was the love of those who are to die.

W
ELL
, he had no job and that was swell for a time. No more slaving at Metz’s. Every morning he toured New York, leaving the house around ten o’clock just as Bill’d be yawning over on his side for a second sleep. Not that it mattered when he left. There were entire days and nights when he never saw Bill, when Business kept him forty-eight hours and more in a stretch.

First stop was usually the Library on Fifth. Entering the huge high marble hush, slithering his feet along the stone floor, he’d take a seat in the magazine room. It was a poor man’s club if there ever was one, bums, the seedy genteel, young men and women without a cent, would get their magazines at the counter and waste an hour or so. Joe noticed one fellow who always read the
Saturday Evening Post,
a nickel mag. What a sap when he could borrow such high-class, expensive mags as the
Cosmopolitan
or the
American Mercury.
Shabby Spaniards, shabby Englishmen, shabby Germans would read the literature of their native lands. Joe’d get a magazine, read for two or three hours, finishing one, then tiptoeing to the desk for another, handing his slip to the pale people behind the counter, who appeared to have other lives, but not happy ones.

He’d leave the club when his eyes hurt, zigzagging from avenue to avenue, from Park to Madison to Seventh, and then back again, exploring each little pool of life off the main rivers, playing sometimes he was dodging Hanrahan, dodging the cruel fate that must overtake the Last Of The Trents. He didn’t have any doubt that Hanrahan’d get them both one day. He’d’ve liked to run away even if Bill said they were safe. There were no jobs and he didn’t look for any. It was a city without work, although it seemed busy and prosperous. He’d tell Bill he’d searched high and low. In the beginning he’d sat around agencies, leaving the house at five in the morning. There was nothing. If he carried the paper in his pocket, the classified ads turned outwards, that was good enough. Mrs. Gebhardt knew he was faking, but she never said a thing to Joe outside of good-morning. He had a hunch the old lady was beginning to regard him as Bill’s kid brother after all.

The walks were burials. Here, as if a thousand miles deep in the silence of the earth, stunned by the multitudes of the city among whom he walked like a ghost, he began to see with startled eyes the extent of the life of which he’d been but one stupid bug at Metz’s, never dreaming the magnitude he crawled. He lost Hanrahan and his own life in this other life, striding Fifth, among its tribes of scarlet-lipped women, their fox terriers and limousines, jostled on Sixth, where the unemployed mobbed the agencies, crowding in front of the white cards scrawled with sucker jobs, adventuring in his own neighborhood, where the poorest Irish and German and Americans had dug themselves in against poverty like soldiers against an atack. He’d cut east and south into the ghettos of Avenues A, B, C, retreating north to Gramercy Park’s green opulence. He slitted his eyes against the ever-flying dust of the city, dodging traffic, pausing a second on lower Eighth Avenue to witness a gypsy wedding party, greasy and smelling, exiting out of a store, the bride pale as a fish and dressed like a cheap Turkish princess, everyone piling into second-hand autos; or, pausing vaguely, dreaming on his city travels, the city of a million far-aways, he’d watch a peddler, or the pinhead at Hubert’s Museum, or be one of an excited crowd with a woman hollering: He cut her head off, the police shoving everyone back, an ambulance on the curb like a vulture. The city opened its blinds to him on a dozen streets and avenues. He witnessed the terrible vision of millions of lives, millions living and dying in a few miles. He had no love for the town. One could not love the city. It was one of God’s uglier creations, a dinosaur, a whale. And all the millions were shadows. He was bewildered, stopping at Union Square, by a Negro with Othello’s head hurling heart and soul against capitalism, by the thousand screamers and exhorters addressing the shadow folk. The city was thronged with machines like animals, and people like animals with heads like horses or cows or wolves. Panhandlers accosted him for a cupacoffee. Couldn’t they see he was broke? The city people were blind, shadows couldn’t ever see.

Bill supplied him with cash, and around noon he’d duck in at a cafeteria and get a sandwich or a plate of spaghetti in a green-painted place on a sidestreet, the proprietor treating him as if he were a lord. Everybody was on the ragged edge, and all customers were millionaires. And all these days in early March would thunder into three o’clock, for the city respected one force, and that Time. No matter where he’d walked in early morning and afternoon, at three he’d be in the locale of the Washington Irving High School. The gongs ringing, the pretzel-sellers and candy-women, nearly all old squatty sexless creatures, competing for the nickels of the young girls. From the block-long school looking like an office building, the crowds of girls’d fill the afternooon with youth, with a feeling of fertility and potential motherhood. Some of them were rouged young ladies, but mostly they were awkward and loud as boys, their hard toughish bodies like boys’, too fat or too skinny, like some gawky intermediate sex before womanhood. He’d be at the corner drug store, observing the city in another of its aspects, the city of a million young girls.

Taller and prettier than the majority, Cathy’s pale face with blue eyes, her yellow hair edging the dark hat, waving her hand at his smiling progress, would appear in reality as well as in thought, her hair seeming yellower, her eyes bluer, his heart rising to some function of sight so that he saw with heart as well as eyes, his body pulsing, his vision losing steadfastness so that she moved towards him on rhythmic beating successive waves of emotion. He’d take her brief-case and they’d walk home in the warming weather, sitting in Union Square, busy with conversations never remembered, that were not to be remembered, careless, light, giddy, like the incredible somersaults of summer grasshoppers. All about them the city hummed and thousands passed with distressed faces. They were a union of two hemmed in by the grand empty visages of the city’s banks and high buildings. Out of it all, they talked. Down among the gray glooms of lofts, they’d venture more happily towards Washington Square, with the kids playing and the Arch’s gallant but meaningless barrier. Through narrow streets like veins running through pale masses of little lives, they’d gradually approach their own house. He’d say good-by in the hallway — this the only speech ever remembered during these March walking days.

Upstairs in his room, thought of her was chaotic. He seemed to have no idea of what she looked like or what he looked like himself, as if both of them were enthralled by the city and made into shadows like everyone else. He couldn’t concentrate on eye color or lip movement. It seemed to him he was empty of gross hard life, light as air, unconfined as air, with but one thought, one idea, and that his love. This love was the sum of both their bodies and individualities. Their flesh shattered, mated in ecstasy, fleshless, wild. How could he tell how either looked or what they’d spoken of when his feeling for her was so voiceless, the shadow of another life? Good-by, Cathy. Good-by. Hell with that. He wanted to be with her, stay with her all the time. If he didn’t say good-by, didn’t float up to his room…. Love meant union, the real union of bodies, just as they now felt that other giddier mental happiness. One was good as the other. His eyes began to flicker craftily like those of a man honestly in love and wondering how he can love the more.

McMann got rid of the stolen jewelry, hocking the rings and stickpin with certain fences. He sold the tickets and had about three hundred in cash. The watch he kept. They divided another hundred equally, smiling on lower Sixth Avenue in a neighborhood of French delicatessens and bleak spinsterlike houses. “The two hunerd’s for the club. Right? Them kids don’t hafta know every damn thing.”

“You’re a prize. You’d gyp your grandmother.”

“So would you.”

They grinned, their lips fixed with the mutual admiration of two outwitting a third party. It was eleven in the morning. The El curved at right angles, looping east. It was a gray morning; February had ended on a deathbed of immense gray clouds, March born gray as the mother month. They discussed a few of the houses they’d seen, knowing all the time which one both of them preferred. It was funny. They had the dough. The decision was easy and yet they argued, sharpening their teeth.

“You’ll tell the kids it was my idea. I’m the brain guy. You’ve elected me.” Bill grinned again as if to add: Whatever you’re planning on doing, don’t think I’m a fool falling blind.

“What’s wrong with that?” His profile was all hard straight lines, the cigarette rigid in his lips. No guessing what a phiz like that thought. Bill regretted his wisecrack. He’d never learned to keep his trap shut.

“Nothing’s wrong.” His heart was weighty and dull before the danger. Here his body was keeping step, his body was safe so far, but there was no ease for him. McMann couldn’t kid him forever. He knew the rat was waiting for the chance to get rid of him. For an infinite second McMann was ageless, neither old nor young, with the vague ageless eternity of a gun or a knife.

“You’re drivin’ at something, Bill.”

“You know what it is, well as me. What do you mean by this brain-guy crap?” Oh, what a fool he was, an ass speaking out of turn, tipping McMann! His words were the vilest idiocies. His head must be softening up.

“You’re nuts.” His teeth showed in even rows out of his red face. It was childhood returning to Bill again. He grinned sickly. Here were the woods and himself in the role of Little Red-Riding-Hood. “We gotta build each other up. You gotta make those kids think you’re somebody.”

They dropped the subject as if it were some common secret possession brought up out of a chest and put back again. They were too busy to bother much, examining the house. It was a three-story sixteen-footer on Sixteenth Street, situated in a block of tenements, the ash-cans and kids in two armies. Across the way was a butcher store. In a big cleared space on the corner the Socony Company sold oil. Eighth Avenue wasn’t a hundred feet away and because of the gas-station their house was practically the corner. They received the key from an Armenian tailor who occupied the first floor, passing through the separate entrance to the upstairs. The two floors were exactly alike, two three-room flats in the front and the same number in the rear overlooking a yard with a clumsy shed and a small tree with gaunt branches like a thin beggar’s arm. It was part of the works. “Some joint,” said McMann, sniffing at the unused atmosphere of the wood and peeling paint. The floors were dusty and the former occupants had worn black silk dresses. “It’ll need a good alteration.” He said the landlord ought to take a month’s rent, and then with the money left they could buy paints. The kids could clean and paint their clubhouse up.

“How do ya know he’ll only take one month?”

“He’ll take what he can get. If we sign a lease we ought to be good for two months’ concession.”

“Boy, we’ll have a joint.” He smiled blandly, his eyes glinting with a sense of might as if he were a baron or millionaire setting up an establishment. “Then a speak’ll chip in, huh?”

They returned the key to the Armenian, a burly man with thick hair and a curved nose that made him appear Jewish. He stood in his undershirt above the pressing-machine, the pressed suits hanging like an army of apparitions behind him. “You take the house?”

“If we do, you’re in luck,” said McMann.

“All political clubs have lots of suits to press and clean for the members. Politicians are snappy,” Bill said.

“And dresses maybe,” laughed McMann.

“It won’t be that kind of political club.”

“I give you good service,” said the Armenian with an effect of bowing.

“Me’n him,” said McMann, “gets a cut. Savvy? A nickel on each suit you press. We’re the leaders at the club.” The Armenian shook his head.

At the gas-station they glanced back at the house, whitewashed by the gas people on the side facing the avenue. “Why grab a nickel on a suit? It won’t make you rich.”

“Won’t make ya poor. Anyway, it’s the principle. All I wants is our stuff pressed free. Big shots are chiselers. You oughta get it, you’re a brain guy.” Bill did most of the talking at the real-estate office. The old feeling among the typewriters clicking out the February statements, pictures of buildings on the wall with certificates of membership on boards and taxpayer groups. They sat opposite a partially bald man with thin dry hands. His name was Gunther and he had the district charted in his head, every house, every loft. After palaver and mutual heeling, they shook hands. Gunther gave Bill a receipt for two months’ rent. McMann counted out eighty dollars. It was a hard bargain, said Gunther. Eighty a month was twenty a week, less than twenty, as there are more than twenty-eight days a month. And the month’s concession. Why didn’t they consider a lease? Not that leases meant anything in these times. Bill declared he’d rather be a monthly tenant. Listen, begged Gunther; he was the agent and knew the details of the estate owning the property. It’d been empty over a year. If their club would sign a lease for two years he’d get the estate to clean and paint their floors from top to bottom. Wouldn’t that be ideal for their organization?