Ironweed (19 page)

          Rosskam reined the horse, braked the wagon, and looped the reins around a hook on the footboard. The wagon stood in the middle of the block, immediately across Pearl Street from the main entrance to the school. More children were exiting and moving in ragged columns toward the church. Blessed are the many meek. Rosskam studied Francis’s hand, still outstretched, with digits gone, scars blazing, veins pounding, fingers curled in the vague beginnings of a fist.

          “Threats,” he said. “You make threats. I don’t like threats. Five-twenty-five I pay, no more.”

          “Five-seventy-five. I say five-seventy-five is what’s fair. You gotta be fair in this life.”

          From inside his shirt Rosskam pulled out a change purse which hung around his neck on a leather thong. He opened it and stripped off five singles, from a wad, counted them twice, and put them in Francis’s outstretched hand, which turned its palm skyward to receive them. Then he added the seventy-five cents.

          “A bum is a bum,” Rosskam said. “I hire no more bums.”

          “I thank ye,” Francis said, pocketing the cash.

          “You I don’t like,” Rosskam said.

          “Well I sorta liked you,” Francis said. “And I ain’t really a bad sort once you get to know me.” He leaped off the wagon and saluted Rosskam, who pulled away without a word or a look, the wagon half full of junk, empty of shades.

                                       o          o          o

          Francis walked toward the house with a more pronounced limp than he’d experienced for weeks. The leg pained him, but not excessively. And yet he was unable to lift it from the sidewalk in a normal gait. He walked exceedingly slowly and to a passerby he would have seemed to be lifting the leg up from a sidewalk paved with glue. He could not see the house half a block away, only a gray porch he judged to be part of it. He paused, seeing a chubby middle-aged woman emerging from another house. When she was about to pass him he spoke.

          “Excuse me, lady, but d’ya know where I could get me a nice little turkey?”

          The woman looked at him with surprise, then terror, and retreated swiftly up her walkway and back into the house. Francis watched her with awe. Why, when he was sober, and wearing a new shirt, should he frighten a woman with a simple question? The door reopened and a shoeless bald man in an undershirt and trousers stood in the doorway.

          “What did you ask my wife?” he said.

          “I asked if she knew where I could get a turkey.”

          “What for?”

          “Well,” said Francis, and he paused, and scuffed one foot, “my duck died.”

          “Just keep movin’, bud.”

          “Gotcha,” Francis said, and he limped on.

          He hailed a group of schoolboys crossing the street toward him and asked: “Hey fellas, you know a meat market around here?”

          “Yeah, Jerry’s,” one said, “up at Broadway and Lawn.”

          Francis saluted the boy as the others stared. When Francis started to walk they all turned and ran ahead of him. He walked past the house without looking at it, his gait improving a bit. He would have to walk two blocks to the market, then two blocks back. Maybe they’d have a turkey for sale. Settle for a chicken? No.

          By the time he reached Lawn Avenue he was walking well, and by Broadway his gait, for him, was normal. The floor of Jerry’s meat market was bare wood, sprinkled with sawdust and extraordinarily clean. Shining white display cases with slanted and glimmering glass offered rows of splendid livers, kidneys, and bacon, provocative steaks and chops, and handsomely ground sausage and hamburg to Francis, the lone customer.

          “Help you?” a white-aproned butcher asked. His hair was so black that his facial skin seemed bleached.

          “Turkey,” Francis said. “I’d like me a nice dead turkey.”

          “It’s the only kind we carry,” the butcher said. “Nice and dead. How big?”

          “How big they come?”

          “So big you wouldn’t believe it.”

          “Gimme a try.”

          “Twenty-five, twenty-eight pounds?”

          “How much those big fellas sell for?”

          “Depends on how much they weigh.”

          “Right. How much a pound, then?”

          “Forty-four cents.”

          “Forty-four. Say forty.” He paused. “You got maybe a twelve-pounder?”

          The butcher entered the white meat locker and came out with a turkey in each hand. He weighed one, then another.

          “Ten pounds here, and this is twelve and a half.”

          “Give us that big guy,” Francis said, and he put the five singles and change on the white counter as the butcher wrapped the turkey in waxy white paper. The butcher left him twenty-five cents change on the counter.

          “How’s business, pal?” Francis asked.

          “Slow. No money in the world.”

          “They’s money. You just gotta go get it. Lookit that five bucks I just give ye. I got me that this afternoon.”

          “If I go out to get money, who’ll mind the store?”

          “Yeah,” said Francis, “I's’pose some guys just gotta sit and wait. But it’s a nice clean place you got to wait in.”

          “Dirty butchers go out of business.”

          “Keep the meat nice and clean, is what it is.”

          “Right. Good advice for everybody. Enjoy your dead turkey.”

                                       o          o          o

          He walked down Broadway to King Brady’s saloon and then stared down toward the foot of North Street, toward Welt the Tin’s barn and the old lock, long gone, a daylight look at last. A few more houses stood on the street now, but it hadn’t changed so awful much. He’d looked briefly at it from the bus, and again last night in the barn, but despite the changes time had made, his eyes now saw only the vision of what had been so long ago; and he gazed down on reconstituted time: two men walking up toward Broadway, one of them looking not unlike himself at twenty-one. He understood the cast of the street’s incline as the young man stepped upward, and upward, and upward toward where Francis stood.

          The turkey’s coldness penetrated his coat, chilling his arm and his side. He switched the package to his other arm and walked up North Third Street toward their house. They’ll figure I want ‘em to cook the turkey, he thought. Just tell ‘em: Here’s a turkey, cook it up of a Sunday.

          Kids came toward him on bikes. Leaves covered the sidewalks of Walter Street. His leg began to ache, his feet again in the glue. Goddamn legs got a life of their own too. He turned the corner, saw the front stoop, walked past it. He turned at the driveway and stopped at the side door just before the garage. He stared at the dotted white curtain behind the door’s four small windowpanes, looked at the knob, at the aluminum milkbox. He’d stole a whole gang of milk outa boxes just like it. Bum. Killer. Thief. He touched the bell, heard the steps, watched the curtain being pulled aside, saw the eye, watched the door open an inch.

          “Howdy,” he said.

          “Yes?”

          Her.

          “Brought a turkey for ye.”

          “A turkey?”

          “Yep. Twelve-and-a-half-pounder.” He held it aloft with one hand.

          “I don’t understand.”

          “I told Bill I’d come by of a Sunday and bring a turkey. It ain’t Sunday but I come anyway.”

          “Is that you, Fran?”

          “It ain’t one of them fellas from Mars.”

          “Well my God. My God, my God.” She opened the door wide.

          “How ya been, Annie? You’re lookin’ good.”

          “Oh come in, come in.” She went up the five stairs ahead of him. Stairs to the left went into the cellar, where he thought he might first enter, carry out some of their throwaways to Rosskam’s wagon before he made himself known. Now he was going into the house itself, closing the side door behind him. Up five stairs with Annie watching and into the kitchen, she backing away in front of him. She’s staring. But she’s smiling. All right.

          “Billy told us he’d seen you,” she said. She stopped in the center of the kitchen and Francis stopped too. “But he didn’t think you’d ever come. My oh my, what a surprise. We saw the story about you in the paper.”

          “Hope it didn’t shame you none.”

          “We all thought it was funny. Everybody in town thought it was funny, registering twenty times to vote.”

          “Twenty-one.”

          “Oh my, Fran. Oh my, what a surprise this is.”

          “Here. Do somethin’ with this critter. It’s freezin’ me up.”

          “You didn’t have to bring anything. And a turkey. What it must’ve cost you.”

          “Iron Joe always used to tell me: Francis, don’t come by empty-handed. Hit the bell with your elbow.”

          She had store teeth in her mouth. Those beauties gone. Her hair was steel-gray, only a trace of the brown left, and her chin was caved in a little from the new teeth. But that smile was the same, that honest-to-god smile. She’d put on weight: bigger breasts, bigger hips; and her shoes turned over at the counters. Varicose veins through the stocking too, hands all red, stains on her apron. That’s what housework does to a pretty kid like she was.

          Like she was when she came into The Wheelbarrow.

          The canalers’ and lumbermen’s saloon that Iron Joe ran at the foot of Main Street.

          Prettiest kid in the North End. Folks always said that about pretty girls.

          But she was.

          Came in lookin’ for Iron Joe,

          And Francis, working up to it for two months,

          Finally spoke to her.

          Howdy, he’d said.

          Two hours later they were sitting between two piles of boards in Kibbee’s lumberyard with nobody to see them, holding hands and Francis saying goopy things he swore to himself he’d never say to anybody.

          And then they kissed.

          Not just then, but some hours or maybe even days later, Francis compared that kiss to Katrina’s first, and found them as different as cats and dogs. Remembering them both now as he stood looking at Annie’s mouth with its store teeth, he perceived that a kiss is as expressive of a way of life as is a smile, or a scarred hand. Kisses come up from below, or down from above. They come from the brain sometimes, sometimes from the heart, and sometimes just from the crotch. Kisses that taper off after a while come only from the heart and leave the taste of sweetness. Kisses that come from the brain tend to try to work things out inside other folks’ mouths and don’t hardly register. And kisses from the crotch and the brain put together, with maybe a little bit of heart, like Katrina’s, well they are the kisses that can send you right around the bend for your whole life.

          But then you get one like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that come out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that weren’t all the way blown up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you gettin’ even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kissin’ almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep openin’ and closin’ to make sure that this is still goin’ and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s okay to close ‘em again, and outa that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you gotta ask where she learned that because nobody ever did that that good except Katrina who was married and with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no, I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, outa that mouth with them new teeth Francis is now looking at, with the same lips he remembers and doesn’t want to kiss anymore except in memory (though that could be subject to change), and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in this woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with a woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or on a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that forever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would be allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same instant that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.

          Such was the significance of that kiss.

          Francis and Annie married a month and a half later.

          Katrina, I will love you forever.

          However, something has come up.

                                       o          o          o

          “The turkey,” Annie said. “You’ll stay while I cook it.”

          “No, that’d take one long time. You just have it when you want to. Sunday, whenever.”

          “It wouldn’t take too long to cook. A few hours is all. Are you going to run off so soon after being away so long?”

          “I ain’t runnin’ off.”