Ironweed (6 page)

          “I wouldn’t drink anything,” Pee Wee said. “I ain’t been in a bar in two years.”

          “They got ginger ale. You allowed to drink ginger ale?”

          “I hope it’s not expensive,” Helen said.

          “Just what you drink,” Pee Wee said. “About usual.”

          “Is it snooty?”

          “It’s a joint, old-timey, but it pulls in the slummers. That’s half the trade.”

          Reverend Chester stepped lively across the room and thrust at Francis a pair of gray woolen socks, his mouth a crescent of pleasure and his great chest heaving with beneficence.

          “Try these for size,” he said.

          “I thank ya for ‘em,” said Francis.

          “They’re good and warm.”

          “Just what I need. Nothin’ left of mine.”

          “It’s fine that you’re off the drink. You’ve got a strong look about you today.”

          “Just a false face for Halloween.”

          “Don’t run yourself down. Have faith.”

          The door to the mission opened and a slim young man in bifocals and a blue topcoat two sizes small for him, his carroty hair a field of cowlicks, stood in its frame. He held the doorknob with one hand and stood directly under the inside ceiling light, casting no shadow.

          “Shut the door,” Pee Wee yelled, and the young man stepped in and shut it. He stood looking at all in the mission, his face a cracked plate, his eyes panicked and rabbity.

          “That’s it for him,” Pee Wee said.

          The preacher strode to the door and stood inches from the young man, studying him, sniffing him.

          “You’re drunk,” the preacher said.

          “I only had a couple.”

          “Oh no. You’re in the beyond.”

          “Honest,” said the young man. “Two bottles of beer.”

          “Where did you get the money for beer?”

          “A fella paid me what he owed me.”

          “You panhandled it.”

          “No.”

          “You’re a bum.”

          “I just had a drink, Reverend.”

          “Get your things together. I told you I wouldn’t put up with this a third time. Arthur, get his bags.”

          Pee Wee stood up from the table and climbed the stairs to the rooms where the resident handful lived while they sorted out their lives. The preacher had invited Francis to stay if he could get the hooch out of his system. He would then have a clean bed, clean clothes, three squares, and a warm room with Jesus in it for as long as it took him to answer the question: What next? Pee Wee held the house record: eight months in the joint, and managing it after three, such was his zeal for abstention. No booze, no smoking upstairs (for drunks are fire hazards), carry your share of the work load, and then rise you must, rise you will, into the brilliant embrace of the just God. The kitchen volunteers stopped their work and came forward with solemnized pity to watch the eviction of one of their promising young men. Pee Wee came down with a suitcase and set it by the door.

          “Give us a cigarette, Pee,” the young man said.

          “Don’t have any.”

          “Well roll one.”

          “I said I don’t have any tobacco.”

          “Oh.”

          “You’ll have to leave now, Little Red,” the preacher said.

          Helen stood up and came over to Little Red and put a cigarette in his hand. He took it and said nothing. Helen struck a match and lit it for him, then sat back down.

          “I don’t have anyplace to go,” Little Red said, blowing smoke past the preacher.

          “You should have thought of that before you started drinking. You are a contumacious young man.”

          “I got noplace to put that bag. And I got a pencil and paper upstairs.”

          “Leave it here. Come and get your pencil and paper when you get that poison out of your system and you can talk sense about yourself.”

          “My pants are in there.”

          “They’ll be all right. Nobody here will touch your pants.”

          “Can I have a cup of coffee?”

          “If you found money for beer, you can find money for coffee.”

          “Where can I go?”

          “I couldn’t begin to imagine. Come back sober and you may have some food. Now get a move on.”

          Little Red grabbed the doorknob, opened the door, and took a step. Then he stepped back in and pointed at his suitcase.

          “I got cigarettes there,” he said.

          “Then get your cigarettes.”

          Little Red undid the belt that held the suitcase together and rummaged for a pack of Camels. He rebuckled the belt and stood up.

          “If I come back tomorrow…”

          “We’ll see about tomorrow,” said the preacher, who grabbed the doorknob himself and pulled it to as he ushered Little Red out into the night.

          “Don’t lose my pants,” Little Red called through the glass of the closing door.

                                       o          o          o

          Francis, wearing his new socks, was first out of the mission, first to cast an anxious glance around the corner of the building at Sandra, who sat propped where he had left her, her eyes sewn as tightly closed by the darkness as the eyes of a diurnal bird. Francis touched her firmly with a finger and she moved, but without opening her eyes. He looked up at the full moon, a silver cinder illuminating this night for bleeding women and frothing madmen, and which warmed him with the enormous shadow it thrust forward in his own path. When Sandra moved he leaned over and put the back of his hand against her cheek and felt the ice of her flesh.

          “You got an old blanket or some old rags, any old bum’s coat to throw over her?” he asked Pee Wee, who stood in the shadows considering the encounter.

          “I could get something,” Pee Wee said, and he loosened his keys and opened the door of the darkened mission: all lights off save the kitchen, which would remain bright until eleven, lockout time. Pee Wee opened the door and entered as Rudy, Helen, and Francis huddled around Sandra, watching her breathe. Francis had watched two dozen people suspire into death, all of them bums except for his father, and Gerald.

          “Maybe if we cut her throat the ambulance’d take her,” Francis said.

          “She doesn’t want an ambulance,” Helen said. “She wants to sleep it all away. I’ll bet she doesn’t even feel cold.”

          “She’s a cake of ice.”

          Sandra moved, turning her head toward the voices but without opening her eyes. “You got no wine?” she asked.

          “No wine, honey,” Helen said.

          Pee Wee came out with a stone-gray rag that might once have been a blanket and wrapped its rough doubleness around Sandra. He tucked it into the neck of her sweater, and with one end formed a cowl behind her head, giving her the look of a monastic beggar in sackcloth.

          “I don’t want to look at her no more,” Francis said, and he walked east on Madison, the deepening chill aggravating his limp. Helen and Pee Wee fell in behind him, and Rudy after that.

          “You ever know her, Pee Wee?” Francis asked. “I mean when she was in shape?”

          “Sure. Everybody knew her. You took your turn. Then she got to givin’ love parties, is what she called ‘em. but she’d turn mean, first love you up and then bite you bad. Half-ruined enough guys so only strangers’d go with her. Then she stopped that and hung out with one bum name of Freddy and they specialized in one another about a year till he went somewheres and she didn’t.”

          “Nobody suffers like a lover left behind,” Helen said.

          “Well that’s a crock,” Francis said. “Lots suffer ain’t ever been in love even once.”

          “They don’t suffer like those who have,” said Helen.

          “Yeah. Where’s this joint, Pee Wee, Green Street?”

          “Right. Couple of blocks. Where the old Gayety Theater used to be.”

          “I used to go there. Watch them ladies’ ankles and cancanny crotches.”

          “Be nice, Francis,” Helen said.

          “I’m nice. I’m the nicest thing you’ll see all week.”

          Goblins came at them on Green Street, hooded spooks, a Charlie Chaplin in whiteface, with derby, cane, and tash, and a girl wearing an enormous old bonnet with a fullsized bird on top of it.

          “They gonna get us!” Francis said. “Look out!” He threw his arms in the air and shook himself in a fearful dance. The children laughed and spooked boo at him.

          “Gee it’s a nice night,” Helen said. “Cold but nice and clear, isn’t it, Fran?”

          “It’s nice,” Francis said. “It’s all nice.”

                                       o          o          o

          The Gilded Cage door opened into the old Gayety lobby, now the back end of a saloon that mimicked and mocked the Bowery pubs of forty years gone. Francis stood looking toward a pair of monumental, half-wrapped breasts that heaved beneath a hennaed wig and scarlet lips. The owner of these spectacular possessions was delivering outward from an elevated platform a song of anguish in the city: You would not insult me, sir, if Jack were only here, in a voice so devoid of musical quality that it mocked its own mockery.

          “She’s terrible,” Helen said. “Awful.”

          “She ain’t that good,” Francis said.

          They stepped across a floor strewn with sawdust, lit by ancient chandeliers and sconces, all electric now, toward a long walnut bar with a shining brass bar rail and three gleaming spittoons. Behind the half-busy bar a man with high collar, string tie, and arm garters drew schooners of beer from a tap, and at tables of no significant location sat men and women Francis recognized: whores, bums, barflies. Among them, at other tables, sat men in business suits, and women with fox scarves and flyaway hats, whose presence was such that their tables this night were landmarks of social significance merely because they were sitting at them. Thus, The Gilded Cage was a museum of unnatural sociality, and the smile of the barman welcomed Francis, Helen, and Rudy, bums all, and Pee Wee, their clean-shirted friend, to the tableau.

          “Table, folks?”

          “Not while there’s a bar rail,” Francis said.

          “Step up, brother. What’s your quaff?”

          “Ginger ale,” said Pee Wee.

          “I believe I’ll have the same,” said Helen.

          “That beer looks tantalizin’,” Francis said.

          “You said you wouldn’t drink,” Helen said.

          “I said wine.”

          The barman slid a schooner with a high collar across the bar to Francis and looked to Rudy, who ordered the same. The piano player struck up a medley of “She May Have Seen Better Days” and “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” and urged those in the audience who knew the lyrics to join in song.

          “You look like a friend of mine,” Francis told the barman, drilling him with a smile and a stare. The barman, with a full head of silver waves and an eloquent white mustache, stared back long enough to ignite a memory. He looked from Francis to Pee Wee, who was also smiling:

          “I think I know you two turks,” the barman said.

          “You thinkin’ right,” Francis said, “except the last time I seen you, you wasn’t sportin’ that pussy-tickler.”

          The barman stroked his silvery lip. “You guys got me drunk in New York.”

          “You got us drunk in every bar on Third Avenue,” Pee Wee said.

          The barman stuck out his hand to Francis.

          “Francis Phelan,” said Francis, “and this here is Rudy the Kraut. He’s all right but he’s nuts.”

          “My kind of fella,” Oscar said.

          “Pee Wee Packer,” Pee Wee said with his hand out.

          “I remember,” said Oscar.

          “And this is Helen,” said Francis. “She hangs out with me, but damned if I know why.”

          “Oscar Reo’s what I still go by, folks, and I really do remember you boys. But I don’t drink anymore.”

          “Hey, me neither,” said Pee Wee.

          “I ain’t turned it off yet,” Francis said. “I’m waitin’ till I retire.”

          “He retired forty years ago,” Pee Wee said.

          “That ain’t true. I worked all day today. Gettin’ rich. How you like my new duds?”

          “You’re a sport,” Oscar said. “Can’t tell you from those swells over there.”

          “Swells and bums, there ain’t no difference,” Francis said.

          “Except swells like to look like swells,” Oscar said, “and bums like to look like bums. Am I right?”

          “You’re a smart fella,” Francis said.

          “You still singin’, Oscar?” Pee Wee asked.

          “For my supper.”

          “Well goddamn it,” Francis said, “give us a tune.”

          “Since you’re so polite about it,” Oscar said. And he turned to the piano man and said: “‘Sixteen’ “; and instantly there came from the piano the strains of “Sweet Sixteen.”

          “Oh that’s a wonderful song,” Helen said. “I remember you singing that on the radio.”

          “How durable of you, my dear.”

          Oscar sang into the bar microphone and, with great resonance and no discernible loss of control from his years with the drink, he turned time back to the age of the village green. The voice was as commonplace to an American ear as Jolson’s, or Morton Downey’s; and even Francis, who rarely listened to the radio, or ever had a radio to listen to in either the early or the modern age, remembered its pitch and its tremolo from the New York binge, when this voice by itself was a chorale of continuous joy for all in earshot, or so it seemed to Francis at a distance of years. And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet… here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.