Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (26 page)

"Jazz 'em all if you like," said Randall,
"but get the money.  Ben,
I want
you to go round with him Saturday."

Ben laughed silently and cynically into the air:

"Oh, my God!" he said.  "Do you
expect me to check up on the little thug?  He's been knocking
down on you for the last six months."

"All right!  All right!" said Randall,
annoyed.  "That's what I want you to find out."

"Oh, for God's sake, Randall," said Ben
contemptuously, "he's got niggers on that book who've been dead
for five years.  That's what you get for keeping every little
crook that comes along."

"If you don't get a move on, 3, I'll give your
route to another boy," said Randall.

"Hell, get another boy.  I don't care,"
said Number 3, toughly.

"Oh, for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't
you?" said Ben, laughing thinly and nodding to his angel,
indicating Number 3 with a scowling jerk of his head.

"Yes, listen to this, won't you!  That's
what I said," Number 3 answered pugnaciously.

"All right, little boy.  Run on and deliver
your papers now, before you get hurt," said Ben, turning his
scowl quietly upon him and looking at him blackly for a moment. 
"Ah, you little crook," he said with profound loathing, "I
have a kid brother who's worth six like you."
 
 

Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf
upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled
with fresh orchard scents.

Gant slept heavily, rattling the loose window-sash
with deep rasping snores; with short explosive thunders, ripping the
lilac night, 36 began to climb Saluda.  She bucked helplessly
like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared
seriously down into the milky boiling creek, and waited.  She
slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up, like a straining mule, into
the dark.  Content, he leaned far out the cab and looked: the
starlight glimmered faintly on the rails.  He ate a thick
sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily
staining it under his big black fingers.  There was a smell of
dogwood and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world.  The
cars clanked humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily
in the hot yellow light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen
at the switch.

Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully,
Tom, goggle-eyed, looked carefully down at him.  They had never
spoken.  Then in silence he turned and took the milk-bottle,
half full of cold coffee, that his fireman offered him.  He
washed his food down with the large easy gurgling swallows of a
bishop.

At 18 Valley Street, the red shack-porch,
slime-scummed with a greasy salve of yellow negroid mud, quaked
rottenly.  Number 3's square-folded ink-fresh paper struck flat
against the door, falling on its edge stiffly to the porch like a
block of light wood. Within, May Corpening stirred nakedly, muttering
as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid
bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.
 
 

Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into
his powerful ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down. 
His bare arms were heavy-muscled as his presses.  He dropped
comfortably into his pliant creaking chair and tilted back, casually
scanning the warm pungent sheet.  Luxurious smoke steamed slowly
from his nostrils. He cast the sheet away.

"Christ!" he said.  "What a
makeup!"

Ben came down stairs, moody, scowling, and humped
over toward the ice-box.

"For God's sake, Mac," he called out
irritably to the Make-up Man, as he scowled under the lifted lid,
"don't you ever keep anything except root-beer and sour milk?"

"What do you want, for Christ's sake?"

"I'd like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while. 
You know," he said bitingly, "Old Man Candler down in
Atlanta is still making it."

Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.

"They haven't got the news up here yet, Ben,"
said he.  "You'll have to wait till the excitement over
Lee's surrender has died down.  Come on," he said abruptly,
getting up, "let's go over to the Greasy Spoon."

He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the
sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad
neck and blue-white sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and
humorous.  He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his
muscles twisting slowly like big snakes.

He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:
 

    
"Beware!  Beware! 
Beware!
     
Many
brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
     
So beware!  Bee-WARE!"
 

Comfortably they rested in the warm completed
exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in
green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work.  The
boys had gone to their routes.  The place seemed to breathe
slowly and wearily.  The dawn-sweet air washed coolly over their
faces.  The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon.
 
 

Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in
the lilac darkness.  Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street,
Number Six, Mrs. Goulderbilt's powerful brown mare, drew inevitably
on the bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with
creamy extra-heavy high-priced milk.  The driver was a
fresh-skinned young countryman, richly odorous with the smell of
fresh sweat and milk. Eight miles, through the starlit dewy fields
and forests of Biltburn, under the high brick English lodgegate, they
had come into the town.
 
 

At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last
door clicked softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss
Bernice Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went
definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until
one o'clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard;
past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful
respirations.  By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his
papers; he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the Eagle
Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent.  He
looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement
to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-gray?the
stars looked drowned.  Not much time left, he thought.  He
had a blond meaty face, pale-colored and covered thickly with young
blond hair.  His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward. 
He ran his tongue along his full cracked underlip.

A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson,
with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station
curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End
Avenue, where the firemen had their tournaments, and zipped townward
doing almost fifty.  The station quietly stirred in its sleep:
there were faint reverberating noises under the empty sheds; brisk
hammer-taps upon  car wheels, metallic heel-clicks in the tiled
waiting-room. Sleepily a negress slopped water on the tiles, with
languid sullen movement pushing a gray sopping rag around the floor.
 
 

It was now five-thirty.  Ben had gone out of the
house into the orchard at three twenty-five.  In another forty
minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires.
 
 

"Ben," said Harry Tugman, as they walked
out of the relaxed office, "if Jimmy Dean comes messing around
my press-room again they can get some one else to print their lousy
sheet.  What the hell!  I can get a job on the Atlanta
Constitution whenever I want it."

"Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.

"Yes," said Harry Tugman, "and he got
out again.  I told him to take his little tail upstairs."

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben.  "What
did he say?"

"He said, 'I'M the editor!  I'm the editor
of this paper!'  'I don't give a good goddam,' I said, 'if
you're the President's snotrag.  If you want any paper to-day
keep out of the pressroom.' And believe me, he went!"

In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of
the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch
No. 3.  It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in
between an optician's and a Greek shoe parlor.

Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently
impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. 
A strong odor of corn whisky soaked the air about him.  His
thick skilful butcher's hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork
numbly.  His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown
patches.  He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered,
fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him.

"Hello, son," he said in his barking kindly
voice, "what can I do for you?"

"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben laughing
contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman.  "Listen
to this, won't you?"

They sat down at the lower end.  At this moment,
Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not
a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. 
His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile
displaying big horse teeth in his white heavily starched face.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he said for no
apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold. 
His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones.

Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard
McGuire's bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar
out of his devil's head and held it between his stained fingers as he
tapped his companion.

"Let's get out," he grinned quietly,
nodding toward Horse Hines. "It will look bad if we're seen
together here."

"Good morning, Ben," said Horse Hines,
sitting down below him. "Are all the folks well?" he added,
softly.

Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his
head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.

"Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile
medicine-man respect, "what do you charge to operate?"

"Operate what?" McGuire barked presently,
having pronged a kidney bean.

"Why--appendicitis," said Harry Tugman, for
it was all he could think of.

"Three hundred dollars when we go into the
belly," said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side.

"You're drowning in your own secretions,"
said Coker with his yellow grin.  "Like Old Lady Sladen."

"My God!" said Harry Tugman, thinking
jealously of lost news. "When did she go?"

"To-night," said Coker.

"God, I'm sorry to hear that," said Harry
Tugman, greatly relieved.

"I've just finished laying the old lady out,"
said Horse Hines gently.  "A bundle of skin and bones." 
He sighed regretfully, and for a moment his boiled eye moistened.

Ben turned his scowling head around with an
expression of nausea.

"Joe," said Horse Hines with merry
professionalism, "give me a mug of that embalming fluid." 
He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the coffee urn.

"Oh, for God's sake," Ben muttered in terms
of loathing.  "Do you ever wash your damned hands before
you come in here?" he burst out irritably.

Ben was twenty.  Men did not think of his age.

"Would you like some cold pork, son?" said
Coker, with his yellow malicious grin.

Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his
hand upon his stomach.

"What's the matter, Ben?"  Harry
Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on the back.

Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the
piece of tanned mince pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side
of Harry Tugman.  Every one laughed.  Then he jerked his
head toward McGuire with a quick frown.

"By God, Tug," he said.  "They've
got us cornered."

"Listen to him," said McGuire to Coker. 
"A chip off the old block, isn't he?  I brought that boy
into the world, saw him through typhoid, got the old man over seven
hundred drunks, and I've been called eighteen different kinds of son
of a bitch for my pains ever since.  But let one of 'em get a
belly ache," he added proudly, "and you'll see how quick
they come running to me.  Isn't that right, Ben?" he said,
turning to him.

"Oh, listen to this!" said Ben, laughing
irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug.  His
bitter savor filled the place with life, with tenderness, with
beauty.  They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes--at his
gray scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile.

"And I tell you something else," said
McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, "if one of them's
got to be cut open, see who gets the job.  What about it, Ben?"
he asked.

"By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire,"
said Ben, "I'm going to be damned sure you can walk straight
before you do."

"Come on, Hugh," said Coker, prodding
McGuire under his shoulder. "Stop chasing those beans around the
plate.  Crawl off or fall off that damned stool--I don't care
which."

McGuire, drunkenly lost in revery, stared witlessly
down at his bean plate and sighed.