The Ninth Wave (17 page)

Then, at that moment, the crowd changed. They had been united in
their hatred of Cromwell. He had come as a stranger and frightened
them. Agreement welled in their faces, rubbed out some of their
dissimilarities, made them suddenly a wedgelike, solid community.
Primitive and breathless they hung at the edge of violence, hating
Cromwell.
Then, at the sound of weariness in his voice, they changed. For a
tiny, poised, balanced moment the whole square was silent. Then they
changed. The hate was still there; palpable in the air, as solid as
fog. But now, it was directed at Cromwell's enemies. As if the weariness
in his voice had opened some gate in every person their hatred flowed
in a different direction.
The crowd knew it at once. They stared at one another dazedly, uncertain
of the change. They took courage as they saw it in the faces of others. A
growl came from the crowd; a growl that was protective of Cromwell; a sound
that threatened his enemies.
"Bene, bene," said a few voices and then the rest of them took it
up. "Bene, bene."
And yet, mixed in their anger, blended in their fury was a thin fundamental
hesitation. For Cromwell had not yet forgiven everything. His bony finger
was still accusing. There was still a distance between all of them and
Cromwell. They did not separate. Instead they huddled closer.
The children stood rigid in front of the crowd. They bent forward with
excitement. Their lips moved as Cromwell talked. When he said "evil" they
repeated the word in a quiet chorus; playing with it the way children
will, extracting by repetition some secret knowledge from the word,
teasing it into a new and deeper meaning. And they did the same with other
words he used, knowing by some infantile instinct which words to take.
The woman in the front row was now rigid with excitement. She waved
her hand in the air and in one corner of her mouth saliva gathered,
ran unnoticed down her chin and dropped to the ground in gobbets.
Cromwell went on, his voice soaring powerfully out into the square. The
voice was full and complete and heavy with assurance.
He went on talking for twenty minutes. The executive committee which
had been standing sullenly behind the platform melted into the crowd
and began to shout "Bene, bene" with the others.
Then, quite suddenly, Cromwell stopped. He was through and he stepped away
from the platform. The crowd hesitated a moment and then applauded. The
woman in the front row stood raptly, her head cocked sideways, staring
after Cromwell. In each eye she had a tear. Her lower lip trembled and
she looked at Cromwell with an expression that was a mixture of regret,
anger and love.
Then the crowd pressed up around Cromwell. He shook hands with everyone
who wished to, but he did it in a cold, austere and formal manner.
"Let's go," Mike said to Connie. "It's over."
They stood up and walked out of the restaurant, moved around the edge
of the crowd and then walked to Connie's car.
CHAPTER 10
On Muscatel and Nerve
and Life and Death
Connie and Mike drove back slowly. They drove past the bocci ball houses,
the pizza restaurants, the clots of old Italian men standing on corners
and all wearing fedoras, the salami factories, the sourdough bakeries.
They stopped at a coffee shop and had a glass of hot chocolate with brandy
foamed into it and they ate a plate of small bitter green olives. They
got back in the car and drove around the foot of Telegraph Hill and
along the Embarcadero. They drove past the empty piers, the big quiet
warehouses and they stopped and watched as a knot of longshoremen worked
one ship under floodlights.
The booms swung back and forth, the winches clanked, and the thin cables
whined up out of the hold with a clutch of cargo at the bitter end. The
apparatus was black and spidery, and the men served it efficiently and
quietly. Occasionally there was a flash of a cargo hook, a voice was
raised, but most of the time it was utterly quiet and the men hardly
spoke.
High above the piers was the curve of the Bay Bridge. The automobile ramps
sparkled with headlights. The cables hung tautly between the great cement
piers. High above the bridge the red aircraft warning lights blinked on
and off. A streetcar moved across the lower level and gave off a grinding,
harsh, metallic noise.
Connie walked to the edge of the pier and looked down at the water. Oil
slicks smeared the water in great iridescent curls and loops. The water
gave off a salty, oily smell as it swished among the pilings, moved by
the passage of unseen ships.
"Let's go," Mike said. "We have to be back by two o'clock or you'll get
a lockout."
As they walked back down the pier, one of the cranes swung a single case
of scotch out of the hold. A checker carefully turned away; then, as
deliberately as a person breaking an egg, the case dropped sharply on the
pier. There was a tinkling sound as the bottles broke and then the case
was lifted a few feet from the surface of the pier. A man shoved a big tub
under the case and the whisky trickled into it. The checker turned around.
"One case of scotch broken by a winch failure," he shouted and made a
notation on his board.
From the deck of the ship came a single laugh. When the trickle of scotch
thinned out the winchman let the case smash once more on the dock, the
remaining bottles were smashed and he raised the case over the tub again.
"All right, let's go," Connie said. "But let's go someplace for a drink
first. I don't want to go right back to Stanford."
They got in the car and Mike headed back across Market.
"Where do you want your drink?" he asked.
"Anyplace," Connie said and hesitated. Then she went on. "Someplace where
there are just men. Not a cute cocktail bar. Someplace that's real. You
know what I mean."
Mike turned up Mission Street. He stopped in front of a bar.
The bar had once had an imitation log-cabin front, but now the brown
exterior of the logs had fallen off in strips and a white, powdery
composition spilled out onto the sidewalk. Above the door a neon light
spelled out "Last Chance." Several men leaned against the imitation logs,
watching a drunk try to get to his feet and applauded his attempts to
stand up. He crawled around a splash of vomit, stared thoughtfully down
at his hands and pushed almost to his feet and then collapsed sideways
with a crumbling boneless motion.
Mike and Connie walked inside. It was dark and Mike saw a row of
men seated at the bar. They were drinking beer or tumbler glasses of
wine. Three tables along the wall were empty. Mike and Connie sat at
one of the tables. Mike walked over to the bar and ordered two beers.
"I wanted a scotch and soda," Connie said when he brought it back.
"Sure you did, but they don't have scotch in here. Bourbon maybe, but
they don't sell a drink of bourbon a week across the bar. If these men
drink bourbon they buy a half-pint bottle and drink it in the street
to save money and then come in here and nurse along a beer or a glass
of wine."
"They don't look very violent," Connie said looking at the almost silent
line of men at the bar.
"They're happy enough," Mike said. "They just don't talk very much. Mostly
they just sit."
Two men at the end of the bar began to argue. One of the men raised his
voice in a petulant whine.
"It's alfalfa. I know it's alfalfa," he said. He swung his arm around
to include the other men at the bar. "Isn't alfalfa the biggest cash
crop in California? Isn't it?"
"It's oranges," the other man said.
The men at the bar ignored the argument, stared down at their glasses,
looked into the dirty mirror behind the bar, stacked and restacked their
change on the bar.
"Everybody thinks it's oranges, but it's alfalfa. God damn, I know it's
alfalfa. You're stupid, Sweeney. God damn you're stupid. Really stupid."
Sweeney said something like "You can't say that to me," but it came out
a squashed, mangled sentence. He pushed back his stool and hit the other
man. The men at the bar swung around to watch, their faces coming to life.
The fight was almost soundless. The two men staggered toward one another,
barely able to keep their balance and as one man's hand hit the elbow or
wrist of the other the man would stumble sideways, trying desperately for
balance. Even when there was a solid blow it lit with a strange weakness
as the other man's body curved away. Like a fantastical slow-motion ballet
the two men pawed at one another in the half-light; stumbling and falling,
sliding down the walls, colliding occasionally and then staggering back,
their arms waving with a slow wildness. Sweeney backed off, carefully
assumed a boxing stance. He jabbed the air with his left hand and with his
right thumb brushed his nose and snorted through his nostrils. His face
lost its boozy softness and became hard. He natrowed his eyes and began
to shuffle toward the other man. The other man watched in fascination,
his arms by his side, impressed by this new decisiveness. As Sweeney
drew back his right arm to strike, the man fell sideways onto a chair,
but Sweeney continued like a machine that once started could not alter
its motion. There was nothing in front of Sweeney except the bare wall,
but deliberately and with great force he hit it. Everyone in the room
heard the crisp crackling sound as several bones in Sweeney's hand
broke. Sweeney wheeled around, his face gone soft again and twisted by
a sudden confusion. He closed in on the other man, but the decisiveness
was gone.
They slipped in puddles of beer and then recovering bumped aimlessly
into one another, recoiled and assumed offensive boxing postures, but the
opportunity was past. Enraged they stared across the room at one another
and then came together, extravagantly weaving and feinting. The fight
had no definite end. People stopped looking at it. It became shadowy and
unreal and at some point it expired and the two drunks stood shoulder
to shoulder breathing heavily, forgetful of what had started the fight.
"Not too savage a fight, eh?" Mike asked.
Connie giggled.
"It was funny. Not like the fights you see in the movies. I expected to
hear the crack of fist against jaw. This was just funny."
A man sitting in the middle of the bar swung around and looked at Mike
and Connie. He stood up and walked over. He walked steadily, but when
he leaned over the table they could see that he was drunk.
"College kids, eh?" he said. "Out slumming. Mind if I have a seat?"
"No. Sit down," Mike said.
The man's eyes had white triangles of sleep in each corner, his beard
showed blue-black through his skin, his collar was brown with dirt. Like
a thin yellow spiderweb, a pattern of old dried vomit was spread over
the shoulder of his suit. The suit itself was expensive, but very dirty.
"I'm a college man," he said. His voice was clear and he spoke slowly,
bringing each word up deliberately from the well of his consciousness.
"Dartmouth '32." He glanced shyly at them. "I know you don't believe me.
What does it matter? I don't care if you believe me."
Mike did not say anything so Connie said, "We believe you."
The man ignored her and went on talking. He talked with determination,
with his eyes fixed on the strings of bubbles that rose from Mike's glass
of beer. His voice was friendly, but inflexible, as if he did not want
to be interrupted.
"You think it's smart to come down here and watch a bunch of broken-down
bums paw one another. Sociology of the drunk, sociology of the whore,
sociology of the misfit. You'll go back to that little cotton-batting
world of yours and tell the other kids all about life on Skid Row. You've
met 'em, or at least you've seen the backs of all those drunks. Oh,
you'll be smart. But you miss the whole point of the thing." He lifted
his eyes from the beer and looked at them. "The point is that you think
these people are misfits. You think being a drunk or a whore or a drifter
is eccentric. But let me tell you friends that it's the only sensible
thing in a society as rotten as ours. When a society is as bad as our
society is today, the only thing to do is to sit drunk all day at a
bar and talk. Or become a whore if you are a woman." He waved in the
direction of the bar. "Those men over there; they are the only people
left who think with their hearts instead of their pocketbooks. These men
are individuals, understand? They're not like the great big stupid mass
that keeps electing a bastard like Roosevelt time after time." He paused
and his face became angry, as if he had recalled something unpleasant.
Then he brightened. "They come into a bar like this and order their beer
and drink it and talk a little bit to the other drunks. Not trying to
make friends, not trying to hustle business, not frantic. They're relaxed,
seep They make sense too. Kind of a hazy, obscured sense, but more iense
than anyone else."
"Can you remember the good sense the next morning?" Mike asked.
"No. Why should you have to? Look, boy, the truth is too delicate to
last for long. By the next morning it's gone. That's the surest sign
it was the truth. If you believe something is true and you write it in
a book and it becomes a habit of the people you have all the evidence
you need that it is not true or that it is unimportant. But at the bar,
hunched over the stool, drinking three beers an hour day in and day
out and eating a few hard-boiled eggs and maybe a hot dog, that is
where you hear the truth." He hesitated a moment as if a new thought
had occurred to him. "You know I've got a constitution like a horse,"
He pounded his chest. "Good lungs, good legs, good arms. I was a 220
man in college. Ran on the relay team that held the world's record for
the half mile. And I'm as fit as when I ran in the '32 Olympics."
"What is your name, mister?" Mike asked.
"Allbright, Jack Allbright. You don't believe me. I'll show you." He
reached in his pocket for his wallet. He brought the wallet out and
laid it on the table and then stopped. "I don't care if you believe
me or not. Why should I try to prove anything to you? What difference
does it make?" He laughed delightedly, but he proceeded to take out
a card and some pictures of himself in shorts and T-shirt, his face
contorted, breaking a tape with his chest. He rummaged around in one of
the compartments of the wallet and took out a Phi Beta Kappa key on a
fine gold chain. He pushed all of it over toward Mike.