The Book of Daniel (25 page)

She told me later it had never before been so good. She couldn’t move for an hour. But leaning over her sleepy smiling eyes I could not find there the education recorded, no impression of the cruel thing, the cruel thing, and that it is always the cruel thing that mixes the tears of our eyes, the breath of our lungs, the creams of our comes….

   When I was in bed I remembered something that had happened at the Shelter. You needed a fever to remember this: I was under some kind of compulsion to prove myself to the other unreclaimed kids in the hardcore. I had this tremendous urge to make it so thoroughly as a Shelter kid that I would become one of the leaders. Leaders are the only ones who ever feel at home. The rest are displaced by the anxiety of trying to make it with the leaders. I wasn’t the best athlete. I mean I did all right but some of those kids were unbelievable stars. One black kid named Roy did everything better than most big guys could: every time up was a hit, he could run like the wind, he could jump higher, catch better, make impossible shots—he could even make the old dead lunk volleyball work, he could make it soar like a kite. Everything he touched was gifted. And he was just the best. There were others there with specialty bags. So my chances as an athlete were not good. But I thought I had as good a mind and tongue as anyone there. I thought I could get there with my mind, which is a tough way to make it in a kid society. A mind without the right attitude, without the right tone, is disastrous in that situation—you end up as some kind of over-articulate fag intellect and you’re out in the cold. So it was a challenge. I’m trying to account for the reasoning, if there was reasoning, that led me to do my imitation of the Inertia Kid. Maybe the ultimate extension of intellect is clowning. In the sitting position Inertia Kid has this hunch in his shoulders, and his head sat crooked as if one of his neckbones was out of socket. His tongue protruded and his eyes saw nothing. His hands lay as if broken at the wrists, the thumb of one in the palm of the other. Without having to think about it, I was able to do a perfect takeoff. I could do his walk, which was a pigeon-toed shuffle. I could do him asleep, which was always on his back with his eyes open. He never closed his eyes to sleep. Only his breathing changed when he was asleep. I did all these routines, becoming in one moment popular for them, a new thing in the society, a wit, a mime of affliction, a priest. And I was able to do my routines without ever having really consciously
observed the Inertia Kid. In fact I found it difficult to look at him.

This is the only time in my life I have ever performed. I haven’t got a performing nature. There are some for whom the turn-on of performing is so total that they must never perform or risk obliteration. I found myself doing the Inertia Kid when nobody was looking. In order to do like he did you had to disconnect your heart muscle, you had to give up your heart, just give it up to its own weight, you had to lift all the rubber bands off the wheels, and slack off the tuning pegs and let the heart lie there in you with disconnected eyes, and unconnected tongue, and limbs lying in their own slackened strings. I could even get the saliva to dribble out of the corner of my mouth. There was for a few days a steady demand, the routine got longer and longer, the cruelty of my observation of the Inertia Kid soon beyond cruelty, a fascinating trip of its own for the wonder of the others, and each time it got harder and harder to stop.

Oh little big brother, pull out, pull out, my wing commander shouts as his grinning and best pilot goes too deep into the stunt. Pull out before the sound plunges into the earth and from one moment to the next there is stillness. I even forgot to breathe. I listened for my heart to stop. My guts strained for air while I tried to remember how to breathe. I was blacking out trying to remember what the light was for.

Why do we need it? What do you do in it? What is it you’re supposed to use it for? What is so valuable after all? What is it that is worth desiring?

A foundation. I desire a Foundation.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yes.”

“If I take you will you be a big girl and do what I say?”

“Yes.”

“Because we have to do it so that no one sees us. And so you have to listen to me and do what I tell you to do. All right?”

“All right.”

“OK, now, that’s a promise.”

“Yes.”

“Say I promise, Daniel.”

“I promise, Daniel.”

“All right. Now today is Thursday. We’re going to escape Saturday. That’s not today and that’s not tomorrow, but the next day.”

“I want to escape now.”

“Susan, you just made a promise. You better listen to me or we won’t do it at all. If we escape before then it will be easier for them to catch us. You don’t want them to catch us, do you?”

“No.”

“All right. All you have to do in the meantime is what they tell you. Go to sleep when they tell you and eat when they tell you. I’m not going to wait for you if you’re tired so you better not be tired. And if you eat something you won’t be hungry when we go. Once we escape I don’t know when we’ll eat. So you’ve got to eat all your food and go to sleep. All right?”

“Yes.”

“And on Saturday we’ll go.”

“Yes.”

“And listen, you can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t. I hate them.”

Saturday the discipline relaxed. Some of the kids were taken home for the weekend. There was no school. There was more free time. After breakfast there was a free period in the yard. There were a lot of kids in the yard all running around. On Saturday no one would stop you in the street to ask why you weren’t in school.

It was a chilly morning. I looked up into the grey sky of swiftly moving clouds and my heart turned over. I was wearing my mackinaw and my leather hunter’s cap. Susan had on her snow jacket with the hood. I had my sneakers but she only had her shiny black ankle-strap shoes. “All right now, sit down here at the fence. That’s it. Now when I say you lie down. I’ll lift up the fence and you roll under it.”

“All right.”

“Then I’ll crawl under. Then run. Run as fast as you can.”

I had this idea that if we went home to Williams, somehow that would have the effect of getting our mother and father home too. I felt that as long as we were in the Shelter, they would be in jail. I felt that they would have no chance of reaching home unless we were there. I wanted to put it all back together.
My reasoning seemed logical at the time. I had no sense of faith or belief. It merely seemed logical that if Susan and I went home, it would be restored. Paul and Rochelle might even precede us. We would meet them.

“All right now, get ready. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No.”

“I don’t know where to find any bathroom, so you better go now if you have to. I’ll wait for you.”

“I don’t.”

Alone in the Cold War, Daniel and Susan run down Tremont Avenue. It is a busy, curving cobblestone avenue lined with stores and delicatessens, movies and automobile showrooms and bars and Chinese restaurants. From west to east it snakes over the hills of the Bronx, a major artery. Trolley tracks, no longer used, flow down its center. It bleats with traffic. Daniel has some knowledge: he knows that the Shelter is in the East Bronx and that his home is in the West Bronx. But he doesn’t know which way is west. He looks for signs on the front of the buses nosing past. He looks for the sun but there is no sun. They scurry along, the little girl pulled by her brother, hurrying along the storefronts, darting past doorways, weaving through the people walking, shopping, waiting for lights at corners. Daniel’s side hurts. Each step brings him pain. He is sweating. “No so fast,” his sister whines. “You’re going to make me fall.”

Every few minutes she has to stop and pull her socks off her heels; her white cotton socks slip down into her shoes, and she has to tug them up.

Ahead the Third Avenue El crosses over Tremont Avenue, leaving a tunnel of shadow, a premonition of long distances. In this darkness of black steel beams that shimmy when the trains roar overhead, the green traffic light shines cool and bright. A newsstand nestles under the stairs leading up to the trains. The smell of hot dogs and juicy fruit gum and popcorn. The suggestion of being lost in the city.

You can’t ask anyone the way because nobody gets more sympathy than a child who has lost his way. People don’t forget that. That is like leaving a trail of bread crumbs. Worse, they take you in hand, you are captured. So you walk in dumb panic,
hoping to be right, looking for signs, prodding your intuition, walking as if you knew where you were going. Decisively, you cross the street and turn left.

“How much more? Are we going to be there soon?”

“Be quiet.”

“Is it soon?”

“Soon. Just be quiet.”

The small warm hand in my hand. The imprint is permanent. The small warm hand in my hand. It is given to me and not withdrawn. The small warm hand in my hand. Every few steps I hear in the traffic and movement of the city a soft
hiss hiss
, like a signal from a doorway, like static from a secret radio. I am ever on the alert for secret signals. But it is Susan sniffing in the privacy of my ear, measuring our progress with intakes from her runny nose. Occasionally she draws a sleeve across her face.

“What are you crying about?”

“I’m not.”

“Am I going too fast?”

“Yes.”

I check to see if anyone is following. We are off the rumbling avenue and walking down a tenement street of the East Bronx. It’s a poor neighborhood. Occasionally we pass small porch houses with asphalt shingles just like ours. No one appears to be following. I slow up but we won’t stop. Kids stare at us from their stoops and doorways. I can’t pretend to be doing anything but passing through. There rises in me a feeling for the Shelter. I think of the lunch hour, the Saturday noon frankfurters. Nostalgia. A slight smear of homesick in the chest. Is that possible? Is it possible for feelings to be that indiscriminate?

Behind us is my vision of the Inertia Kid lying on his bunk. I am sorry for my routines. They were a failure. He knew I made fun of him. He knew what I was doing. I feel terrible. I feel the sickness of someone who has sold out. Occasionally in certain lights the idiocy of his expression was momentarily erased. His face was comely. I knew he was handsome and wise. I was afraid to look at him. I adored him. If I had stayed at the
Shelter I could have taken care of him and protected him from impersonations. Could Roy hit a ball, jump as high?

In the afternoon Daniel and Susan had come to the section of Bathgate Avenue between 173rd Street and Claremont Parkway that was an open market of fruit and vegetable stalls and peddlers’ pushcarts at the curbs. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and the merchants in their full-length white aprons over their coats cried out their prices to passersby. Pyramids of apples and dark grapes, oranges and pumpkins, rose from the stalls. Prices written on brown paper bags impaled on wooden slats. Two pounds for nineteen cents! Six for thirty-three! Fresh! Sweet! Juicy! Bushels of green peppers. Boxes of carrots in bunches, and the green topping is wrung off upon purchase. Dates poured into a bag from a metal scoop. Indian nuts. Rock candy. They stood in front of an open Appetizing store magnetized by the slabs of lox, and the pickle barrels and the nut trays and the herring in cream. Who’s next! How much, lady! The women elbowed past, their shopping bags crammed. The smell of warm fresh bread floated out of a white bakery. The butcher’s freezer door slammed shut with a great clank. And here, with sawdust on the floor, was a store just like Irving’s Fish Market, with the live fish swimming in a tank and waiting for Irving’s rolling pin to stun them just before the knife sliced off their heads. How much, lady! And along the curbs were the pushcarts of notions and buttons and thread, of a selection of ladies’ panties, of factory-second shoes and sneakers tied by the laces, of bananas, just bananas, a pushcart piled with bananas, the peddler a specialist in bananas. With all those bananas he had to move them cheaper than the next guy. How much, lady! They’re rotten, a lady tells her friend. And everywhere were the cries of life and commerce, and the smells of the oranges and warm bread and fish and cheap new shoes. Cars inched through the narrow street. Mothers and children shouted back and forth from the street to the fire escapes. With Susan in tow Daniel slowly drifted in the eddying currents of shoppers. Loaded shopping bags swung into him. Old men pushed him out of the way. It was a dangerous passage but his heart was lifted because he had recognized Bathgate Avenue and knew it. Bathgate was
spoken of with approval by his mother and father, who regretted only that it was too far to go to shop every day. But the food was best there, and the prices cheapest, and on special occasions, like with Mindish driving them in his old Chrysler, the Isaacsons would stock up from the rich markets of Bathgate Avenue. Shopping on Bathgate was a skill. One took satisfaction from one’s judgments and one’s purchases. Daniel also knew that when he came to Claremont Avenue he would be able to see the hills of Claremont Park, and that by climbing up the steps from Webster Avenue into Claremont Park he would inevitably come to Weeks Avenue not two blocks from his home.

“We’ll be there soon, Susan.”

He knew she was hungry. He considered stealing something; he had already seen two different kids filching fruit, but he was afraid. He didn’t mind getting shoved around in the street because he felt virtually invisible. Who could tell that he and Susan didn’t belong to someone walking right in front of them or right behind them? But if he stole something and was caught he would no longer be invisible. “We’ll be home soon,” he said over his shoulder.

And then tell of that last leg of the journey, the most frightening and dangerous. Claremont Avenue was a wide, dangerous street of traffic. Then you had to cross Webster, a confusing, doubly wide street of tracks and buses and cars going two ways, and lights that didn’t seem to allow the opportunity to cross. It didn’t seem like a street that was meant to be crossed. Also with the steep walls of the park on the other side this was an area open under the sky. One’s head and shoulders were vulnerable in the open spaces of the city. Crossing Webster and climbing the steep stone flights to the park, I became sensitive to the extreme danger of what I was doing. We were becoming exhausted. Also, now that we were leaving the depths of the East Bronx for the heights of Claremont, I remembered the Brookies, a gang of East Bronx terrorists who came up off Brook Avenue like a wind and raided the softer, barely better-off neighborhoods around this park and beat up the little kids and cut them and took their money. The closer we got to our neighborhood the more frightened we became. Susan began to cry. The tears flowed, the snot flowed. She wanted to sit down on a bench and rest. She
wanted to pull up her socks which had disappeared into her shoes. Her shoes were blistering the backs of her heels.