Authors: Eugene Burdick
The Ninth Wave (5 page)
"What do you mean by that?" Mike asked.
"For one thing I'm depending on you to pull me through some of the courses.
The ones in English and history and that sort of thing. I don't do very well
in those." Hank hesitated and then went on. "I didn't tell you, but I'm
going to take a pre-med come. There will be lots of chemistry and biology
and that sort of thing. I want to concentrate on those. You pull me
through the other courses and we'll forget about the money. Just say
yes or no."
"Yes."
From behind them they heard the shrill, peculiarly heavy whine of truck
tires going too fast. Hank looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled far
over to the right. The truck flashed by them; too fast to see anything
except a white blob of a face, a long stack of red bricks and the blur
of wheels. As it passed they heard a harsh long-continued grind, the
raw smash of metal against metal, and then a snap as the transmission
refused to slip into a lower gear.
"He must be doing eighty," Hank said quietly.
"His brakes were gone," Mike said. "You could smell them as he went by."
The truck quickly grew smaller, seemed to fade away. The red bricks
shimmered for a moment and then the truck disappeared around a
slower-moving truck. Faintly, but still with the savage tear of metal
gnashing, they heard the truck try to go into gear. Each time it snapped
out. Then even the sound was gone.
"Mike, what do they do when you get to Stanford?" Hank asked. "I mean
do they have someone to meet you, to show you around?"
Mike looked over, startled.
"Hankus, no one is going to say hello, goodbye, or yes, no, kiss my ass,"
Mike said. "They'll take your money, stamp your cards and that will be
it. What did you expect?"
"I didn't know what to expect. That's why I asked. O.K. Now I know."
"You know, but it doesn't make you feel very good," Mike said. He put
his hands behind his head and leaned back in the seat. "Well, it makes
me feel good. I don't want anyone to shake my hand and show me around
and then feel that he has done me a favor. I want to arrive and look
around and know that every person I look at doesn't give the slightest
damn about me. No obligations, no debts. Then you can do what you want."
"What do you want to do?" Hank asked quietly.
"I'm not sure. But when I decide I want to be able to do it. I want to
be able to look at every person and figure they are enemies and then
decide what I want to do. I don't want to be tied up with some of them."
Mike hesitated, reached for adequate words. "It sounds a little crazy,
Hank. I know. But I've got a theory."
"What's your theory?"
"I don't have it all worked out yet. Just part of it. But I'll work out
the rest of it. But right now I know I don't want to feel obligated. I
don't want a lot of this phony friendship crap. Later when I know more
I'll tell you the whole theory."
Hank looked over at Mike. Mike was looking straight ahead and he had
an odd half-smile; the lips drawn back as if to smile, no real humor
on his face. Really, Hank thought, it's like the beginning of a snarl,
but when Mike does it, it looks attractive. He knew that Mike would
never tell him the rest of the theory.
Ten miles later they passed the semi with the bricks. When it hit a tree
at the side of the road the bricks had kept moving and sliced off the
top of the cab. There was an ambulance there and someone was picking
wet fragments off the stacks of bricks. A bored cop was motioning cars
past. A man and woman had stopped their car and were quickly loading
some of the loose bricks into the back seat. A cop ran toward them and
waved them away. Hank drove quickly past and a few miles later he took
the turnoff for Coalinga and Blackwell's Corners.
They drove for a half hour past old oil well derricks. The derricks were
oil soaked and great clots of dust stuck to them. Beneath most of the
derricks was a neat shiny engine which drove a pumping ann slowly up
and down. The various pumps were connected by a pattern of pipes which
led to large shiny tanks. There were no men in the oil fields for these
were old wells and needed little care. They slowed down for Taft and
then shot down the road toward Coalinga.
"Hank, where did you come from before you came to L.A.?" Mike asked.
Hank looked at Mike and saw that he was smiling, but he saw it was a
different smile now. "North Dakota."
"Really? I thought you were from New York or Chicago."
"That's because I'm Jewish. Everybody in California thinks that Jews
come from Brooklyn or Chicago."
"Was your name Hank Moore in North Dakota?" Mike asked. "That isn't a
very Jewish name."
"It isn't Jewish at all. My name has always been Hank Moore though. I
had a father who thought if you called things by different names you
might eventually change them."
"And he wanted to change things?"
"Sure. He wanted to stop being a Jew and be something else. I couldn't
blame the poor bastard. When he was a kid his father took him out on the
road to sell hardware, cheap jewelry, perfume, everything. Dad was no good
at it and somehow he got into the hotel business and drifted from town to
town. Finally he wound up owning a railroad hotel in this town in North
Dakota. Ever seen a railroad hotel? Well, this one was a beauty . . . "
It had twenty-eight rooms and was just fifty feet from the railroad
tracks and a set of switching spurs. It was a square ugly old building
that had been painted once, but now had only a few shreds of paint up
around the eaves and in spots where the sun never hit. In the winter,
the wind came solid and cold off the prairie and the half-inch boards of
the hotel seemed barely able to keep it out, really to only break the
flat blast of it. In the summer it absorbed all the heat in the sky;
filled itself with moist-packed hotness during the day and held it
tightly throughout the night. When trains went by the hotel chattered,
light bulbs flickered and water spilled out of glasses that were too
full. There were no fans in the hotel and each six rooms shared a toilet
and bath. The washbowls had deep yellow scars in them where dripping
water had built up a slow growing stain.
Occasionally a commercial man would come there by mistake, but he would
never stay longer than one night.
Hank's father sat behind the desk in the lobby. A naked electric bulb
shone down on his balding head and threw his watering eyes into the
shadow. He had long sloping shoulders and big muscles, but his body
had the wrinkled baggy look of an athlete who has suddenly stopped
exercising. His skin drooped off his arms in sheets and was dry and
scaly. The skin on his face was a collection of sags and folds that
pressed down on one another. He never spoke to anyone. Occasionally he
would reach an arm out and stop a brakeman or engineer who hadn't paid
for a few weeks and hold his palm up. The men would laugh and give him
whatever change they had and he would enter the sum in a large notebook
which he kept in a childish scrawling hand.
Once a month his father caught a ride in a caboose to Bismarck, and
was back in two days. After each trip he would take a slip of white
paper carefully from his pocket and drive it on the nail of a spindle
that he kept in the back of the unlocked safe. Hank had looked once at
the pieces of paper. The old ones on the bottom were browned with age,
while the ones on the top were crisper and newer looking. At the top
of each slip of paper was the letterhead, "Dr. J.J. Locke. Specialist
in Men's Diseases. All Consultation Private, No Painful Operations
Necessary." And then the line, "Laboratory Report." Under this would be
a line in handwriting. "Wassermann test, plus." Occasionally the slips
of paper would bear a prescription for pills and his father would take
the pills for a few days and then forget them. A drawer under his desk
was full of little blue boxes which had forgotten pills in them.
Hank could not remember his mother. She had disappeared somewhere
long ago.
Hank had worked in the hotel when he was a boy. He had peeled potatoes
in the kitchen, pounded the thick red strips of tough meat with flour,
opened cans of pale string beans and helped serve the food in thick
porcelain bowls. He had cut hundreds of pies into dry crusty triangles,
each with a lip of thin sugary goo on its edges and served them to the
men in the dining room. Sometimes when they could not get a chambermaid
he made the beds and swept the corridors. The floors were old soft wood
and they smelled of Lysol. The bedrooms smelled of tobacco and coal and
dried grease. He liked working in the kitchen best because he could talk
to the endless stream of Chinese cooks that worked there. They came in,
silent, yellow and smooth skinned, cooked for several months and then
moved on. One had been a college boy from Columbia on his way back to
China. He had talked patiently to Hank about Confucianism, explaining
over and over in his singsong voice that it all hinged on the love and
respect for one's parents. Hank had laughed at him and finally the cook
had left one night after slapping Hank with the flat edge of a knife.
When Hank was eight he had asked his father about going to school. His
father had turned his heavy, shiny head down from the height of the
stool and looked over the counter at Hank. He had scratched his head and
a few white scales fell from his fingernails. Finally he had turned his
hands up in a noncommittal gesture and shrugged his shoulders. So Hank
had forgotten about school until he was thirteen.
When he was not working in the hotel Hank hung around various buildings
and offices in the town. The best place was the rear of the taxicab
office where the tobacco-stained politics of the town were decided. In
front of the taxi office there was a neon light that blinked steadily,
day and night, summer and winter, "Taxi. Five ride for the price of
one." In the rear of the office there were a half dozen chairs with
smooth leather cushions on them. The chairs were occupied by three
scrawny-necked merchants, who were brothers, and the fat-jowled chief
of police. The chief was related to one of the merchants. In the '28
campaign they had put a picture of Al Smith underneath the spittoon and
all you could see was the fringe of Al's head. Across the white part of
the sign someone printed "A Dirty Cat-licker." The spit splashed brown
stains over the picture, and by election time it had vanished beneath a
hardened scum of old tobacco-specked saliva. When the election was over
Hank had removed the poster and looked at the circle that had lain under
the spittoon. There was a bright circle of a man's face with a bright
politician's smile on it and the then hardened brown juice, framing it
all. He cut it out with a razor and took it back to the hotel.
In the taxi office they had a file case full of little half-pint bottles
of corn whisky and when an election got close, which was seldom, they
would send the three taxicab drivers out into town. The drivers would
scour the town, making their tiny bribes with the bottles. They would
sweep the pool hall, the hotel, the several Negro families alongside
the railroad track, the farm boys in town for election, the whores,
everyone before them into the polls. They would come just before the
polls closed, a waving, yelling froth of men and women. They would
flow into the polls and vote. The drivers would herd them in gently,
joking with them and making sure that they knew where to put the X. No
one ever cheated when they got behind the black curtain; none of them
got that drunk, not on a half pint of whisky.
The town regularly spent $43,500 a year and the three turkey-necked
merchants and the chief controlled every cent of it. They noted it down
on the back of envelopes and shifted the figures around and laughed a
good deal. Once they gave the chief $1200 to go to an F.B.I. course in
Washington, but he had a few drinks on the train and went to New York
and stayed in a big hotel with a famous movie actress for a week. "Forty
dollars for black lace panties and eighty-five for good bonded bourbon,"
he had told the merchants when he returned and they had filled the back
of the office with laughter. He never did tell anyone the actress's name.
Hank learned about business and high finance from a Jewish tailor. His
name was Cohen and he had a little shop on the main street. He had lost
his wife and four children in a pogrom in Poland. The mob had closed
in dense and black on the ghetto, moving down the streets with a soft
tinkling of broken glass and a great roaring sound. Cohen had hurried
his family ahead of him as long as he could and then the youngest boy
had said he had a stitch in his side and wanted to stop. In a second of
panic Cohen had left his wife and four children huddled together against
a wall as he ran ahead to search for a hiding place. He heard the strange
lowing, eager sound of the mob and then as he ran back toward his family
he saw the mob reach them. There was a nameless, odd, sharp snapping
noise as the mob absorbed his family and he knew instinctively that
they were all dead. He ran toward the mob, a thin scarecrow of a man,
hoping to be killed, to be kicked to death, to suffer for a few seconds
and then be gone with his family. He muttered curses through his stringy
beard as he ran shouting in a high messianic voice for revenge and threw
his skinny arms wildly in the air.
The mob hesitated as they saw him. The low ominous howl diminished and
they stared at him with bewilderment. By the time he reached them they
were no longer a mob, only stolid businessmen, housewives, laborers,
electricians, fishmongers. He threw himself on these individuals, hoping
to be picked up and beaten and killed. But they pushed him away, the
bright excitement fading from their eyes and replaced by a look of
boredom. The crowd split up, began to walk away and there was no way
that he could arouse them. He was never able to find the bodies of his
family, for as if the mob had been a huge animal they had been absorbed,
digested, and vanished away.
Since the pogrom Cohen had always felt threatened by crowds. When his
tailor shop had three or four customers simultaneously his eyes began to
bulge slightly and he breathed quickly. Hank was in his shop one day when
the Rotary Club came out of the hotel after their luncheon, their feet
scraping on the pavement, their voices laughing, the sound of a crowd of
people in motion. Cohen's head snapped up, his needle gleamed in the air,
he seemed to stop breathing for a long second. Hank listened with the
Jew's ears and a shiver of fear ran down his back as the businessmen
laughed, shuffled their feet, lifted their voices in raucous jokes.
"For one thing I'm depending on you to pull me through some of the courses.
The ones in English and history and that sort of thing. I don't do very well
in those." Hank hesitated and then went on. "I didn't tell you, but I'm
going to take a pre-med come. There will be lots of chemistry and biology
and that sort of thing. I want to concentrate on those. You pull me
through the other courses and we'll forget about the money. Just say
yes or no."
"Yes."
From behind them they heard the shrill, peculiarly heavy whine of truck
tires going too fast. Hank looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled far
over to the right. The truck flashed by them; too fast to see anything
except a white blob of a face, a long stack of red bricks and the blur
of wheels. As it passed they heard a harsh long-continued grind, the
raw smash of metal against metal, and then a snap as the transmission
refused to slip into a lower gear.
"He must be doing eighty," Hank said quietly.
"His brakes were gone," Mike said. "You could smell them as he went by."
The truck quickly grew smaller, seemed to fade away. The red bricks
shimmered for a moment and then the truck disappeared around a
slower-moving truck. Faintly, but still with the savage tear of metal
gnashing, they heard the truck try to go into gear. Each time it snapped
out. Then even the sound was gone.
"Mike, what do they do when you get to Stanford?" Hank asked. "I mean
do they have someone to meet you, to show you around?"
Mike looked over, startled.
"Hankus, no one is going to say hello, goodbye, or yes, no, kiss my ass,"
Mike said. "They'll take your money, stamp your cards and that will be
it. What did you expect?"
"I didn't know what to expect. That's why I asked. O.K. Now I know."
"You know, but it doesn't make you feel very good," Mike said. He put
his hands behind his head and leaned back in the seat. "Well, it makes
me feel good. I don't want anyone to shake my hand and show me around
and then feel that he has done me a favor. I want to arrive and look
around and know that every person I look at doesn't give the slightest
damn about me. No obligations, no debts. Then you can do what you want."
"What do you want to do?" Hank asked quietly.
"I'm not sure. But when I decide I want to be able to do it. I want to
be able to look at every person and figure they are enemies and then
decide what I want to do. I don't want to be tied up with some of them."
Mike hesitated, reached for adequate words. "It sounds a little crazy,
Hank. I know. But I've got a theory."
"What's your theory?"
"I don't have it all worked out yet. Just part of it. But I'll work out
the rest of it. But right now I know I don't want to feel obligated. I
don't want a lot of this phony friendship crap. Later when I know more
I'll tell you the whole theory."
Hank looked over at Mike. Mike was looking straight ahead and he had
an odd half-smile; the lips drawn back as if to smile, no real humor
on his face. Really, Hank thought, it's like the beginning of a snarl,
but when Mike does it, it looks attractive. He knew that Mike would
never tell him the rest of the theory.
Ten miles later they passed the semi with the bricks. When it hit a tree
at the side of the road the bricks had kept moving and sliced off the
top of the cab. There was an ambulance there and someone was picking
wet fragments off the stacks of bricks. A bored cop was motioning cars
past. A man and woman had stopped their car and were quickly loading
some of the loose bricks into the back seat. A cop ran toward them and
waved them away. Hank drove quickly past and a few miles later he took
the turnoff for Coalinga and Blackwell's Corners.
They drove for a half hour past old oil well derricks. The derricks were
oil soaked and great clots of dust stuck to them. Beneath most of the
derricks was a neat shiny engine which drove a pumping ann slowly up
and down. The various pumps were connected by a pattern of pipes which
led to large shiny tanks. There were no men in the oil fields for these
were old wells and needed little care. They slowed down for Taft and
then shot down the road toward Coalinga.
"Hank, where did you come from before you came to L.A.?" Mike asked.
Hank looked at Mike and saw that he was smiling, but he saw it was a
different smile now. "North Dakota."
"Really? I thought you were from New York or Chicago."
"That's because I'm Jewish. Everybody in California thinks that Jews
come from Brooklyn or Chicago."
"Was your name Hank Moore in North Dakota?" Mike asked. "That isn't a
very Jewish name."
"It isn't Jewish at all. My name has always been Hank Moore though. I
had a father who thought if you called things by different names you
might eventually change them."
"And he wanted to change things?"
"Sure. He wanted to stop being a Jew and be something else. I couldn't
blame the poor bastard. When he was a kid his father took him out on the
road to sell hardware, cheap jewelry, perfume, everything. Dad was no good
at it and somehow he got into the hotel business and drifted from town to
town. Finally he wound up owning a railroad hotel in this town in North
Dakota. Ever seen a railroad hotel? Well, this one was a beauty . . . "
It had twenty-eight rooms and was just fifty feet from the railroad
tracks and a set of switching spurs. It was a square ugly old building
that had been painted once, but now had only a few shreds of paint up
around the eaves and in spots where the sun never hit. In the winter,
the wind came solid and cold off the prairie and the half-inch boards of
the hotel seemed barely able to keep it out, really to only break the
flat blast of it. In the summer it absorbed all the heat in the sky;
filled itself with moist-packed hotness during the day and held it
tightly throughout the night. When trains went by the hotel chattered,
light bulbs flickered and water spilled out of glasses that were too
full. There were no fans in the hotel and each six rooms shared a toilet
and bath. The washbowls had deep yellow scars in them where dripping
water had built up a slow growing stain.
Occasionally a commercial man would come there by mistake, but he would
never stay longer than one night.
Hank's father sat behind the desk in the lobby. A naked electric bulb
shone down on his balding head and threw his watering eyes into the
shadow. He had long sloping shoulders and big muscles, but his body
had the wrinkled baggy look of an athlete who has suddenly stopped
exercising. His skin drooped off his arms in sheets and was dry and
scaly. The skin on his face was a collection of sags and folds that
pressed down on one another. He never spoke to anyone. Occasionally he
would reach an arm out and stop a brakeman or engineer who hadn't paid
for a few weeks and hold his palm up. The men would laugh and give him
whatever change they had and he would enter the sum in a large notebook
which he kept in a childish scrawling hand.
Once a month his father caught a ride in a caboose to Bismarck, and
was back in two days. After each trip he would take a slip of white
paper carefully from his pocket and drive it on the nail of a spindle
that he kept in the back of the unlocked safe. Hank had looked once at
the pieces of paper. The old ones on the bottom were browned with age,
while the ones on the top were crisper and newer looking. At the top
of each slip of paper was the letterhead, "Dr. J.J. Locke. Specialist
in Men's Diseases. All Consultation Private, No Painful Operations
Necessary." And then the line, "Laboratory Report." Under this would be
a line in handwriting. "Wassermann test, plus." Occasionally the slips
of paper would bear a prescription for pills and his father would take
the pills for a few days and then forget them. A drawer under his desk
was full of little blue boxes which had forgotten pills in them.
Hank could not remember his mother. She had disappeared somewhere
long ago.
Hank had worked in the hotel when he was a boy. He had peeled potatoes
in the kitchen, pounded the thick red strips of tough meat with flour,
opened cans of pale string beans and helped serve the food in thick
porcelain bowls. He had cut hundreds of pies into dry crusty triangles,
each with a lip of thin sugary goo on its edges and served them to the
men in the dining room. Sometimes when they could not get a chambermaid
he made the beds and swept the corridors. The floors were old soft wood
and they smelled of Lysol. The bedrooms smelled of tobacco and coal and
dried grease. He liked working in the kitchen best because he could talk
to the endless stream of Chinese cooks that worked there. They came in,
silent, yellow and smooth skinned, cooked for several months and then
moved on. One had been a college boy from Columbia on his way back to
China. He had talked patiently to Hank about Confucianism, explaining
over and over in his singsong voice that it all hinged on the love and
respect for one's parents. Hank had laughed at him and finally the cook
had left one night after slapping Hank with the flat edge of a knife.
When Hank was eight he had asked his father about going to school. His
father had turned his heavy, shiny head down from the height of the
stool and looked over the counter at Hank. He had scratched his head and
a few white scales fell from his fingernails. Finally he had turned his
hands up in a noncommittal gesture and shrugged his shoulders. So Hank
had forgotten about school until he was thirteen.
When he was not working in the hotel Hank hung around various buildings
and offices in the town. The best place was the rear of the taxicab
office where the tobacco-stained politics of the town were decided. In
front of the taxi office there was a neon light that blinked steadily,
day and night, summer and winter, "Taxi. Five ride for the price of
one." In the rear of the office there were a half dozen chairs with
smooth leather cushions on them. The chairs were occupied by three
scrawny-necked merchants, who were brothers, and the fat-jowled chief
of police. The chief was related to one of the merchants. In the '28
campaign they had put a picture of Al Smith underneath the spittoon and
all you could see was the fringe of Al's head. Across the white part of
the sign someone printed "A Dirty Cat-licker." The spit splashed brown
stains over the picture, and by election time it had vanished beneath a
hardened scum of old tobacco-specked saliva. When the election was over
Hank had removed the poster and looked at the circle that had lain under
the spittoon. There was a bright circle of a man's face with a bright
politician's smile on it and the then hardened brown juice, framing it
all. He cut it out with a razor and took it back to the hotel.
In the taxi office they had a file case full of little half-pint bottles
of corn whisky and when an election got close, which was seldom, they
would send the three taxicab drivers out into town. The drivers would
scour the town, making their tiny bribes with the bottles. They would
sweep the pool hall, the hotel, the several Negro families alongside
the railroad track, the farm boys in town for election, the whores,
everyone before them into the polls. They would come just before the
polls closed, a waving, yelling froth of men and women. They would
flow into the polls and vote. The drivers would herd them in gently,
joking with them and making sure that they knew where to put the X. No
one ever cheated when they got behind the black curtain; none of them
got that drunk, not on a half pint of whisky.
The town regularly spent $43,500 a year and the three turkey-necked
merchants and the chief controlled every cent of it. They noted it down
on the back of envelopes and shifted the figures around and laughed a
good deal. Once they gave the chief $1200 to go to an F.B.I. course in
Washington, but he had a few drinks on the train and went to New York
and stayed in a big hotel with a famous movie actress for a week. "Forty
dollars for black lace panties and eighty-five for good bonded bourbon,"
he had told the merchants when he returned and they had filled the back
of the office with laughter. He never did tell anyone the actress's name.
Hank learned about business and high finance from a Jewish tailor. His
name was Cohen and he had a little shop on the main street. He had lost
his wife and four children in a pogrom in Poland. The mob had closed
in dense and black on the ghetto, moving down the streets with a soft
tinkling of broken glass and a great roaring sound. Cohen had hurried
his family ahead of him as long as he could and then the youngest boy
had said he had a stitch in his side and wanted to stop. In a second of
panic Cohen had left his wife and four children huddled together against
a wall as he ran ahead to search for a hiding place. He heard the strange
lowing, eager sound of the mob and then as he ran back toward his family
he saw the mob reach them. There was a nameless, odd, sharp snapping
noise as the mob absorbed his family and he knew instinctively that
they were all dead. He ran toward the mob, a thin scarecrow of a man,
hoping to be killed, to be kicked to death, to suffer for a few seconds
and then be gone with his family. He muttered curses through his stringy
beard as he ran shouting in a high messianic voice for revenge and threw
his skinny arms wildly in the air.
The mob hesitated as they saw him. The low ominous howl diminished and
they stared at him with bewilderment. By the time he reached them they
were no longer a mob, only stolid businessmen, housewives, laborers,
electricians, fishmongers. He threw himself on these individuals, hoping
to be picked up and beaten and killed. But they pushed him away, the
bright excitement fading from their eyes and replaced by a look of
boredom. The crowd split up, began to walk away and there was no way
that he could arouse them. He was never able to find the bodies of his
family, for as if the mob had been a huge animal they had been absorbed,
digested, and vanished away.
Since the pogrom Cohen had always felt threatened by crowds. When his
tailor shop had three or four customers simultaneously his eyes began to
bulge slightly and he breathed quickly. Hank was in his shop one day when
the Rotary Club came out of the hotel after their luncheon, their feet
scraping on the pavement, their voices laughing, the sound of a crowd of
people in motion. Cohen's head snapped up, his needle gleamed in the air,
he seemed to stop breathing for a long second. Hank listened with the
Jew's ears and a shiver of fear ran down his back as the businessmen
laughed, shuffled their feet, lifted their voices in raucous jokes.
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