Ironweed (11 page)

          “It’d choke me.”

          “It won’t choke you. You’ll be glad for it.”

          “I’m not a phony.”

          “I’m not a phony either.”

          “You’re not, eh?”

          “You know what I’ll do?” He grabbed her collar and her throat and screamed into her eyes. “I’ll knock you right across that goddamn street! You don’t bullshit me one time. Be a goddamn woman! That’s the reason you can’t flop with nobody. I can go up there right now and sleep. Jack said I could stay.”

          “He did not.”

          “He certainly did. But they don’t want you. I asked for a sandwich. Did I get it?”

          “You’re really stupendous and colossal.”

          “Listen”—-and he still held her by the collar—”you squint your eyes at me and I’ll knock you over that goddamn automobile. You been a pain in the ass to me for nine years. They don’t want you because you’re a pain in the ass.”

          Headlights moved north on Pearl Street, coming toward them, and Francis let go of her; she did not move, but stared at him.

          “You got some goddamn eyes, you know?” He was screaming. “I’ll black ‘em for you. You’re a horse’s ass! You know what I’ll do? I’ll rip that fuckin’ coat off and put you in rags.”

          She did not move her body or her eyes.

          “I’m gonna eat this sandwich. Whole hunk of cheese.”

          “I don’t want it.”

          “By god I do. I’ll be hungry tomorrow. It won’t choke me. I’m thankful for everything.”

          “You’re a perfect saint.”

          “Listen. Straighten up or I’m gonna kill you.”

          “I won’t eat it. It’s rat food.”

          “I’m gonna kill you!” Francis screamed. “Goddamn it, you hear what I said? Don’t drive me insane. Be a goddamn woman and go the fuck to bed somewhere.”

          They walked, not quite together, toward Madison Avenue, south again on South Pearl, retracing their steps. Francis brushed Helen’s arm and she moved away from him.

          “You gonna stay at the mission with Pee Wee?”

          “No.”

          “Then you gonna stay with me?”

          “I’m going to call my brother.”

          “Good. Call him. Call him a couple of times.”

          “I’ll have him meet me someplace.”

          “Where you gonna get the nickel to make the call?”

          “That’s my business. God, Francis, you were all right till you started on the wine. Wine, wine, wine.”

          “I’ll get some cardboard. We’ll go to that old building.”

          “The police keep raiding that place. I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t know why you didn’t stay with Jack and Clara since you were so welcome.”

          “You’re a woman for abuse.”

          They walked east on Madison, past the mission. Helen did not look in. When they reached Green Street she stopped.

          “I’m going down below.” she said.

          “Who you kiddin’?” Francis said. “You got no place to go. You’ll be knocked on the head.”

          “That wouldn’t he the worst ever happened to me.”

          “We got to find something. Can’t leave a dog out like this.”

          “Shows you what kind of people they are up there.”

          “Stay with me.’’

          “No, Francis. You’re crazy.”

          He grabbed the hair at the back of her head, then held her whole head in both hands.

          “You’re gonna hit me,” she said.

          “I wont hit ya, babe. I love ya some. Are ya awful cold?”

          “I don’t think I’ve been warm once in two days.’’

           Francis let go of her and took off his suitcoat and put it around her shoulders.

          “No, it’s too cold for you to do that,” she said. “I’ve got this coat. You can’t be in just a shirt.’’

          “What the hell’s the difference. Coat ain’t no protection.”

          She handed him back the coat. “I’m going.” she said.

          “Don’t walk away from me.” Francis said. “You’ll be lost in the world.”

          But she walked away. And Francis leaned against the light pole on the corner, lit the cigarette Jack had given him, fingered the dollar bill Jack had slipped him in the kitchen, ate what was left of the cheese sandwich, and then threw his old undershorts down the sewer.

                                       o          o          o

          Helen walked down Green Street to a vacant lot, where she saw a fire in an oil drum. From across the street she could see five coloreds around the fire, men and women. On an old sofa in the weeds just beyond the drum, she saw a white woman lying underneath a colored man. She walked back to where Francis waited.

          “I couldn’t stay outside tonight,” she said. “I’d die.”

          Francis nodded and they walked to Finny’s car, a 1930 black Oldsmobile, dead and wheelless in an alley off John Street. Two men were asleep in it, Finny in the front passenger seat.

          “I don’t know that man in back,” Helen said.

          “Yeah you do,” said Francis. “That’s Little Red from the mission. He won’t bother you. If he does I’ll pull out his tongue.”

          “I don’t want to get in there, Francis.”

          “It’s warm, anyhow. Cold in them weeds, honey, awful cold. You walk the streets alone, they’ll pinch you quicker’n hell.”

          “You get in the back.”

          “No. No room in there for the likes of me. Legs’re too long.”

          “Where will you go?”

          “I’ll find me some of them tall weeds, get outa the wind.”

          “Are you coming back?”

          “Sure, I’ll be back. You get a good sleep and I’ll see you here or up at the mission in the ayem.”

          “I don’t want to stay here.”

          “You got to, babe. It’s what there is.”

          Francis opened the passenger door and shook Finny.

          “Hey bum. Move over. You got a visitor.”

          Finny opened his eyes, heavy with wine. Little Red was snoring.

          “Who the hell are you?” Finny said.

          “It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in.”

          “Francis.” Finny raised his head.

          “I’ll get you a jug tomorrow for this, old buddy,” Francis said. “She’s gotta get in outa this weather.”

          “Yeah,” said Finny.

          “Never mind yeah, just move your ass over and let her sit. She can’t sleep behind that wheel, condition her stomach’s in.”

          “Unnngghh,” said Finny, and he slid behind the wheel.

          Helen sat on the front seat, dangling her legs out of the car. Francis stroked her cheek with three fingertips and then let his hand fall. She lifted her legs inside.

          “You don’t have to be scared,” Francis said.

          “I’m not scared,” Helen said. “Not that.”

          “Finny won’t let nothin’ happen to you. I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he does.”

          “She knows,” Finny said. “She’s been here before.”

          “Sure,” said Francis. “Nothing can happen to you.”

          “No.”

          “See you in the mornin’.”

          “Sure.”

          “Keep the faith,” Francis said.

          And he closed the car door.

                                       o          o          o

          He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more. Because he needed to confront the ragman in the morning, he would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?

          He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square, where as a child he’d boarded the riverboats for outings to Troy, or Kingston, or picnics on Lagoon Island. He passed the D & H building and Billy Barnes’s Albany
Evening Journal
, a building his simpleminded brother Tommy had helped build in 1913. He walked up to Maiden Lane and Broadway, where Keeler’s Hotel used to be, and where his brother Peter sometimes spent the night when he was on the outs with Mama. But Keeler’s burned the year after Francis ran away and now it was a bunch of stores. Francis had rowed down Broadway to the hotel, Billy in the rowboat with him, in 1913 when the river rose away the hell and gone up and flooded half of downtown. The kid loved it. Said he liked it better’n sleigh ridin’. Gone. What the hell ain’t gone? Well, me. Yeah, me. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of me left, but I ain’t gone entirely. Be goddiddley-damned if I’m gonna roll over and die.

          Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.

          He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin’s barn, still standing. Who’d believe it? Could Welt the Tin be livin’? Not likely. Too dumb to live so long. Was it in use? Still a barn? Looks like a barn. But who keeps horses now?

          The barn was a shell, with a vast hole in the far end of the roof where moonlight poured cold fire onto the ancient splintered floor. Bats flew in balletic arcs around the streetlamp outside, the last lamp on North Street; and the ghosts of mules and horses snorted and stomped for Francis. He scuffed at the floorboards himself and found them solid. He touched them and found them dry. One barn door canted on one hinge, and Francis calculated that if he could move the door a few feet to sleep in its lee, he would be protected from the wind on three sides. No moonlight leaked through the roof above this corner, the same corner where Welt the Tin had hung his rakes and pitchforks, all in a row between spaced nails.

          Francis would reclaim this corner, restore all rakes and pitchforks, return for the night the face of Welt the Tin as it had been, reinvest himself with serendipitous memories of a lost age. On a far shelf in the moonlight he saw a pile of papers and a cardboard box. He spread the papers in his chosen corner, ripped the box at its seams, and lay down on the flattened pile.

          He had lived not seventy-five feet from where he now lay.

          Seventy-five feet from this spot, Gerald Phelan died on the 26th of April, 1916.

          In Finny’s car Helen would probably be pulling off Finny, or taking him in her mouth. Finny would be unequal to intercourse, and Helen would be too fat for a toss in the front seat. Helen would be equal to any such task. He knew, though she had never told him, that she once had to fuck two strangers to be able to sleep in peace. Francis accepted this cuckoldry as readily as he accepted the onus of pulling the blanket off Clara and penetrating whatever dimensions of reek necessary to gain access to a bed. Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?

          Maybe I won’t survive tonight after all, Francis thought as he folded his hands between his thighs. He drew his knees up toward his chest, not quite so high as Foxy Phil Tooker’s, and considered the death he had caused in this life, and was perhaps causing still. Helen is dying and Francis is perhaps the principal agent of hastening her death, even as his whole being tonight has been directed to keeping her from freezing in the dust like Sandra. I don’t want to die before you do, Helen, is what Francis thought. You’ll be like a little kid in the world without me.

          He thought of his father flying through the air and knew the old man was in heaven. The good leave us behind to think about the deeds they did. His mother would be in purgatory, probably for goddamn ever. She wasn’t evil enough for hell, shrew of shrews that she was, denier of life. But he couldn’t see her ever getting a foot into heaven either, if they ever got such a place.

          The new and frigid air of November lay on Francis like a blanket of glass. Its weight rendered him motionless and brought peace to his body, and the stillness brought a cessation of anguish to his brain. In a dream he was only just beginning to enter, horns and mountains rose up out of the earth, the horns—ethereal, trumpets—sounding with a virtuosity equal to the perilousness of the crags and cornices of the mountainous pathways. Francis recognized the song the trumpets played and he floated with its melody. Then, yielding not without trepidation to its coded urgency, he ascended bodily into the exalted reaches of the world where the song had been composed so long ago. And he slept.

IV

          Francis stood in the junkyard driveway, looking for old Rosskam. Gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks blew swiftly past the early-morning sun, the world shimmered in a sudden blast of incandescence, and Francis blinked. His eyes roved over a cemetery of dead things: rusted-out gas stoves, broken wood stoves, dead iceboxes, and bicycles with twisted wheels. A mountain of worn-out rubber tires cast its shadow on a vast plain of rusty pipes, children’s wagons, toasters, automobile fenders. A three-sided shed half a block long sheltered a mountain range of cardboard, paper, and rags.

          Francis stepped into this castoff world and walked toward a wooden shack, small and tilted, with a swayback horse hitched to a four-wheeled wooden wagon in front of it. Beyond the wagon a small mountain of wagon wheels rose alongside a sprawling scatter of pans, cans, irons, pots, and kettles, and a sea of metal fragments that no longer had names.