Cannery Row (17 page)

“What kind of babies?” Willard asked.

“Regular babies, only before they’re borned.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Willard.

“Well, it’s true. The Sprague kid seen them and he says they ain’t no bigger than this and they got little hands and feet and eyes.”

“And hair?” Willard demanded.

“Well, the Sprague kid didn’t say about hair.”

“You should of asked him. I think he’s a liar.”

“You better not let him hear you say that,” said Joey.

“Well, you can tell him I said it. I ain’t afraid of him and I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of anybody. You want to make something of it?” Joey didn’t answer. “Well, do you?”

“No,” said Joey. “I was thinkin’, why don’t we just go up and ask the guy if he’s got babies in bottles? Maybe he’d show them to us, that is if he’s got any.”

“He ain’t here,” said Willard. “When he’s here, his car’s here. He’s away some place. I think it’s a lie. I think the Sprague kid is a liar. I think you’re a liar. You want to make something of that?”

It was a lazy day. Willard was going to have to work hard to get up any excitement. “I think you’re a coward, too. You want to make something of that?” Joey didn’t answer. Willard changed his tactics. “Where’s your old man now?” he asked in a conversational tone.

“He’s dead,” said Joey.

“Oh yeah? I didn’t hear. What’d he die of?”

For a moment Joey was silent. He knew Willard knew but he couldn’t let on he knew, not without fighting Willard, and Joey was afraid of Willard.

“He committed—he killed himself.”

“Yeah?” Willard put on a long face. “How’d he do it?”

“He took rat poison.”

Willard’s voice shrieked with laughter. “What’d he think—he was a rat?”

Joey chuckled a little at the joke, just enough, that is.

“He must of thought he was a rat,” Willard cried. “Did he go crawling around like this—look, Joey—like this? Did he wrinkle up his nose like this? Did he have a big old long tail?” Willard was helpless with laughter. “Why’n’t he just get a rat trap and put his head in it?” They laughed themselves out on that one, Willard really wore it out. Then he probed for another joke. “What’d he look like when he took it—like this?” He crossed his eyes and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

“He was sick all day,” said Joey. “He didn’t die ’til the middle of the night. It hurt him.”

Willard said, “What’d he do it for?”

“He couldn’t get a job,” said Joey. “Nearly a year he couldn’t get a job. And you know the funny thing? The next morning a guy come around to give him a job.”

Willard tried to recapture his joke. “I guess he just figured he was a rat,” he said, but it fell through even for Willard.

Joey stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He saw a little coppery shine in the gutter and walked toward it but just as he reached it Willard shoved him aside and picked up the penny.

“I saw it first,” Joey cried. “It’s mine.”

“You want to try and make something of it?” said Willard. “Why’n’t you go take some rat poison?”

27

Mack and the boys—the Virtues, the Beatitudes, the Beauties. They sat in the Palace Flophouse and they were the stone dropped in the pool, the impulse which sent out ripples to all of Cannery Row and beyond, to Pacific Grove, to Monterey, even over the hill to Carmel.

“This time,” said Mack, “we got to be sure he gets to the party. If he don’t get there, we don’t give it.”

“Where we going to give it this time?” Jones asked.

Mack tipped his chair back against the wall and hooked his feet around the front legs. “I’ve give that a lot of thought,” he said. “Of course we could give it here but it would be pretty hard to surprise him here. And Doc likes his own place. He’s got his music there.” Mack scowled around the room. “I don’t know who broke his phonograph last time,” he said. “But if anybody so much as lays a finger on it next time I personally will kick the hell out of him.”

“I guess we’ll just have to give it at his place,” said Hughie.

People didn’t get the news of the party—the knowledge of it just slowly grew up in them. And no one was invited. Everyone was going. October 27 had a mental red circle around it. And since it was to be a birthday party there were presents to be considered.

Take the girls at Dora’s. All of them had at one time or another gone over to the laboratory for advice or medicine or simply for unprofessional company. And they had seen Doc’s bed. It was covered with an old faded red blanket full of fox tails and burrs and sand, for he took it on all his collecting trips. If money came in he bought laboratory equipment. It never occurred to him to buy a new blanket for himself. Dora’s girls were making him a patchwork quilt, a beautiful thing of silk. And since most of the silk available came from underclothing and evening dresses, the quilt was glorious in strips of flesh pink and orchid and pale yellow and cerise. They worked on it in the late mornings and in the afternoons before the boys from the sardine fleet came in. Under the community of effort, those fights and ill feelings that always are present in a whore house completely disappeared.

Lee Chong got out and inspected a twenty-five-foot string of firecrackers and a big bag of China lily bulbs. These to his way of thinking were the finest things you could have for a party.

Sam Malloy had long had a theory of antiques. He knew that old furniture and glass and crockery, which had not been very valuable in its day, had when time went by taken on desirability and cash value out of all proportion to its beauty or utility. He knew of one chair that had brought five hundred dollars. Sam collected pieces of historic automobiles and he was convinced that some day his collection, after making him very rich, would repose on black velvet in the best museums. Sam gave the party a good deal of thought and then he went over his treasures which he kept in a big locked box behind the boiler. He decided to give Doc one of his finest pieces—the connecting rod and piston from a 1916 Chalmers. He rubbed and polished this beauty until it gleamed like a piece of ancient armor. He made a little box for it and lined it with black cloth.

Mack and the boys gave the problem considerable thought and came to the conclusion that Doc always wanted cats and had some trouble getting them. Mack brought out his double cage. They borrowed a female in an interesting condition and set their trap under the cypress tree at the top of the vacant lot. In the corner of the Palace they built a wire cage and in it their collection of angry tom cats grew with every night. Jones had to make two trips a day to the canneries for fish heads to feed their charges. Mack considered and correctly that twenty-five tom cats would be as nice a present as they could give Doc.

“No decorations this time,” said Mack. “Just a good solid party with lots of liquor.”

Gay heard about the party clear over in the Salinas jail and he made a deal with the sheriff to get off that night and borrowed two dollars from him for a round trip bus ticket. Gay had been very nice to the sheriff who wasn’t a man to forget it, particularly because election was coming up and Gay could, or said he could, swing quite a few votes. Besides, Gay could give the Salinas jail a bad name if he wanted to.

Henri had suddenly decided that the old-fashioned pincushion was an art form which had flowered and reached its peak in the Nineties and had since been neglected. He revived the form and was delighted to see what could be done with colored pins. The picture was never completed—you could change it by rearranging the pins. He was preparing a group of these pieces for a one-man show when he heard about the party and he instantly abandoned his own work and began a giant pincushion for Doc. It was to be an intricate and provocative design in green, yellow, and blue pins, all cool colors, and its title was Pre-Cambrian Memory.

Henri’s friend Eric, a learned barber who collected the first editions of writers who never had a second edition or a second book, decided to give Doc a rowing machine he had got at the bankruptcy proceedings of a client with a three-year barber bill. The rowing machine was in fine condition. No one had rowed it much. No one ever uses a rowing machine.

The conspiracy grew and there were endless visits back and forth, discussion of presents, of liquor, of what time will we start and nobody must tell Doc.

Doc didn’t know when he first became aware that something was going on that concerned him. In Lee Chong’s, conversation stopped when he entered. At first it seemed to him that people were cold to him. When at least half a dozen people asked him what he was doing October 27 he was puzzled, for he had forgotten he had given this date as his birthday. Actually he had been interested in the horoscope for a spurious birth date but Mack had never mentioned it again and so Doc forgot it.

One evening he stopped in at the Halfway House because they had a draft beer he liked and kept it at the right temperature. He gulped his first glass and then settled down to enjoy his second when he heard a drunk talking to the bartender. “You goin’ to the party?”

“What party?”

“Well,” said the drunk confidentially, “you know Doc, down in Cannery Row.”

The bartender looked up the bar and then back.

“Well,” said the drunk, “they’re givin’ him a hell of a party on his birthday.”

“Who is?”

“Everybody.”

Doc mulled this over. He did not know the drunk at all.

His reaction to the idea was not simple. He felt a great warmth that they should want to give him a party and at the same time he quaked inwardly remembering the last one they had given.

Now everything fell into place—Mack’s question and the silences when he was about. He thought of it a lot that night sitting beside his desk. He glanced about considering what things would have to be locked up. He knew the party was going to cost him plenty.

The next day he began making his own preparations for the party. His best records he carried into the back room where they could be locked away. He moved every bit of equipment that was breakable back there too. He knew how it would be—his guests would be hungry and they wouldn’t bring anything to eat. They would run out of liquor early, they always did. A little wearily he went up to the Thrift Market where there was a fine and understanding butcher. They discussed meat for some time. Doc ordered fifteen pounds of steaks, ten pounds of tomatoes, twelve heads of lettuce, six loaves of bread, a big jar of peanut butter and one of strawberry jam, five gallons of wine and four quarts of a good substantial but not distinguished whiskey. He knew he would have trouble at the bank the first of the month. Three or four such parties, he thought, and he would lose the laboratory.

Meanwhile on the Row the planning reached a crescendo. Doc was right, no one thought of food but there were odd pints and quarts put away all over. The collection of presents was growing and the guest list, if there had been one, was a little like a census. At the Bear Flag a constant discussion went on about what to wear. Since they would not be working, the girls did not want to wear the long beautiful dresses which were their uniforms. They decided to wear street clothes. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Dora insisted that a skeleton crew remain on duty to take care of the regulars. The girls divided up into shifts, some to stay until they were relieved by others. They had to flip for who would go to the party first. The first ones would see Doc’s face when they gave him the beautiful quilt. They had it on a frame in the dining room and it was nearly finished. Mrs. Malloy had put aside her bedspread for a while. She was crocheting six doilies for Doc’s beer glasses. The first excitement was gone from the Row now and its place was taken by a deadly cumulative earnestness. There were fifteen tom cats in the cage at the Palace Flophouse and their yowling made Darling a little nervous at night.

28

Sooner or later Frankie was bound to hear about the party. For Frankie drifted about like a small cloud. He was always on the edge of groups. No one noticed him or paid any attention to him. You couldn’t tell whether he was listening or not. But Frankie did hear about the party and he heard about the presents and a feeling of fullness swelled in him and a feeling of sick longing.

In the window of Jacobs’ Jewelry Store was the most beautiful thing in the world. It had been there a long time. It was a black onyx clock with a gold face but on top of it was the real beauty. On top was a bronze group—St. George killing the dragon. The dragon was on his back with his claws in the air and in his breast was St. George’s spear. The Saint was in full armor with the visor raised and he rode a fat, big-buttocked horse. With his spear he pinned the dragon to the ground. But the wonderful thing was that he wore a pointed beard and he looked a little like Doc.

Frankie walked to Alvarado Street several times a week to stand in front of the window and look at this beauty. He dreamed about it too, dreamed of running his fingers over the rich, smooth bronze. He had known about it for months when he heard of the party and the presents.

Frankie stood on the sidewalk for an hour before he went inside. “Well?” said Mr. Jacobs. He had given Frankie a visual frisk as he came in and he knew there wasn’t 75 cents on him.

“How much is that?” Frankie asked huskily.

“What?”

“That.”

“You mean the clock? Fifty dollars—with the group seventy-five dollars.”

Frankie walked out without replying. He went down to the beach and crawled under an overturned rowboat and peeked out at the little waves. The bronze beauty was so strong in his head that it seemed to stand out in front of him. And a frantic trapped feeling came over him. He had to get the beauty. His eyes were fierce when he thought of it.

He stayed under the boat all day and at night he emerged and went back to Alvarado Street. While people went to the movies and came out and went to the Golden Poppy, he walked up and down the block. And he didn’t get tired or sleepy, for the beauty burned in him like fire.