Authors: Eugene Burdick
The Ninth Wave (6 page)
"It's the Rotary Club," 'Hank said, leaning toward Cohen. "They've just
finished their Tuesday lunch."
"Ya, ya, of course," Cohen breathed, "only the Rotary Club." His lips
curved into a smile although his eyes were brilliant with fear. He did
not relax until the last sound had left the street.
Hank was in Cohen's shop on a Fourth of July. Across town a band was
playing, firecrackers popped and a parade was beginning. The sounds
drifted lazily through the hot summer air, people put chairs on their
lawns to watch the parade pass, the pulse of the town was slow. Cohen
sat with the cloth close to his face, stitching rapidly and talking into
the cloth.
The parade rounded a corner far away and suddenly, by some odd refraction
of sound, in the tailor shop Hank and Cohen could hear the shuffling of
the parade, slow, steady, cadenced. The music stopped for a moment and
down the hot dead air of the town, caught between the unpainted buildings,
came the sound of marching feet. The sound of feet was not obscured by
the music, but was a raw, solid sound with a vitality of its own. Cohen
looked over the piece of cloth, his eyes glittered with terror. He put
the cloth down and stood up.
"I'm going for a, walk," he said and started for the rear door.
"I'll go with you," Hank said, but the tailor did not even hear him. He
walked quickly, staring straight ahead. He stumbled once over a sleeping
dog and swung his head vaguely toward it when it barked in pain. Hank
walked beside him. They were at the edge of town and still the sound of
the parade had not diminished, but seemed to throb and swell as if the
parade were growing in size. At some point Hank stopped thinking of it
as a parade and thought of it as a mob also.
They both walked faster and faster and when they got to the edge of town
they cut across a field of rye. They were almost running as they crossed
it and when he looked back Hank could see the erratic, zigzag path they
had left, as if two small and insane animals had passed through. They
splashed through a small creek and were oblivious of the mud that caked
on their shoes. At some point the sound of the parade died away and
they began to walk at a normal pace. Late that night they re-entered
the town and Hank went quietly to the railroad hotel.
Ever since that night Hank had known that he was a Jew. The crazy,
stumbling flight through the town and across the fields was a kind of
ritual; an initiation; the assumption of a burden; a primitive act of
faith. Hank was thirteen years old at the time.
Hank learned about love and the family from the girls at the hotel. Some
of them were plain dumpy girls who worked in restaurants or in stores and
others were simply whores, who wore flashy clothes very tight across the
hips. And the professionals wore furs that Hank could not forget. They were
skimpy fox pelts with the heads still attached. The jaws were strengthened
by a spring and each of the mouths bit into the tail of another and they
went over a woman's shoulder in an endless circle of biting foxes. Even
before he knew what the girls did in the upstairs rooms of the hotel
Hank hated them for the furs with the little glass eyes, tiny varnished
claws and red biting mouths.
The girls drifted into the hotel around nightfall. Some of them went
steady with one man; others simply sat in the lobby and waited for an
invitation. Because of the thinness of the walls, the open doors and the
loud voices, what went on in the rooms between men and women could not
be avoided. The sounds of it echoed in the corridors and the men talked
about it in the dining room so that to Hank it was like the Lysol smell
of the floors or the loose scabs of ancient paint on the outside ok the
hotel. It was part of the hotel; part of its dark smelly substance.
When he was eleven Hank had seen Old Kelly, the oldest engineer on the
line, beat up one of the girls. She had run out into the hall and Old
Kelly had caught her at the foot of the stairs. They had stood there,
both of them naked, Old Kelly hitting her the way men hit one another,
straight solid blows on the lumpy body of the woman. It made a sound
like someone kneading bread; not a slapping sound, but a dull, soggy,
damaging sound. The woman had scratched out at Old Kelly, but finally had
fallen forward into his arms, so that he could no longer hit her. Hank
had watched them make their stumbling broken way back to the room.
Once two of the girls, a little older than the rest, had stopped him in
the lobby. They were both very drunk and ready to cry. One had patted
him on the head and said, "A little boy I might have had." Hank had
knocked her hand away and backed off, angry. The two girls had cried,
looking hopelessly at one another and at Hank. Big tears soaked their
way through the powder and rouge and dropped pinkly and aimlessly from
their chins. Their grief had been so great that they had staggered out
into the night, without waiting for their railroaders to arrive.
By the time he was thirteen Hank was too big and gawky to sit in the
corners. They ran him out of the taxicab office and the pool hall and
Cohen asked him one day why he didn't get a job. The girls in the hotel
began to get angry with him for looking at them. Hank decided to go
to school.
Hank enrolled in the local high school. He was the best student they had
ever had. He finished the first two years of work in a single year. But
at the start of his senior year he discovered mathematics and poker and
quit school.
As soon as he learned mathematics in school, he began to calculate the
odds in the poker game that went on day after day down at the hotel. He
took a statistics textbook from the library and with the deck of cards
out in front of him he figured various combinations. He memorized columns
and columns of figures and odds and chances until gradually he forgot the
columns and knew by merely looking at a hand how it could be improved,
how it compared with other hands and how a kicker would help it. Then he
went down to the lobby where the men played poker and watched them. He
moved from one man to another, watching their hands, checking their
chances with his statistics. He noticed how some men place a chip over
an ace when it comes to them down; that few men look again at their
down card in stud if it is a face card; that most men swallow when they
make a good draw; that the time to win in a poker game is late in the
evenings when players are anxious to win back losings. The statistics
he had learned rapidly, but the way men play took longer. At the end of
a year he thought he knew enough to play.
One night he asked the men if he could play and they laughed and let him
in. He bought five dollars worth of chips, a little stack of white and
red, that when held between his fingers ran only up to his second knuckle.
He lost rapidly until he had only three white chips and one red chip left
in his fingers. Then he got over the confusion caused by the smoke over
the table, the eyes, the rapid flicking of the cards and he started to
win. He played cautiously, like a very stingy old man, and by midnight
he had won six dollars. He was sixteen years old.
After that he played three nights a week. He carefully calculated his
winnings from each man so that he never won enough from any one to anger
him. His winnings were steady and constant, never varying more than fifty
cents from the sum he predicted for the night. In a few months he had
five hundred dollars in a cigar box in his room. The cigar box bulged
with old tattered one-dollar bills, slick new fives, an occasional ten
and a pile of silver coins.
One day he heard a fireman state that the landlord's son was too good at
poker not to be a cheater. Several of the other men nodded agreement. That
night he got into the game on the first hand.
Carefully and very slowly he began to boost the bets. He made all of the
men commit themselves equally and by midnight a few of them were beginning
to sweat and the smoke around the shaded light was thick and yellow.
By three o'clock the pots were averaging over fifty dollars each. The eyes
around the table had turned red and the floor was littered with sandwich
crusts and empty whisky bottles. Hank had won four hundred dollars by
then. He went relentlessly after the rest and by dawn he had all the money
on the board and a note from one of the railroaders that he owed Hank
$66. Finally he played them for their change, for the nickels and dimes
in their pockets. He played one engineer for his Waltham and stuck it in
his pocket when he won. Some of the losers began to complain, but Hank
ignored them and went on playing. Toward the end he made such large bets
that even men with good hands could not afford to back up their cards.
When he had all of the visible money on the table, he said he was going
to the toilet and left the room. He went to his room, packed a wicker
suitcase full of clothes and climbed out a window. He walked to the
railroad yard and swung up into an empty boxcar. The next day he was in
Bismarck . . .
"Why did you come to Manual Arts High after all that?" Mike asked when
Hank was finished. "You could be a professional gambler."
"Too boring," Hank said. "Gambling is the hardest way in the world to
earn a living. Show me a gambler and I'll show you either a man bored
stiff or a knucklehead . . . or both."
"Do you ever hear from your father?"
"No. Not a word."
"Why don't you write him? I heard Jews were supposed to be great family
people . . . always taking care of one another and watching out for other
members of the family."
"Sure, Mike. You hear a lot of things that aren't so," Hank said and
grinned. "That's one of them. I'll tell you some more later."
A mile ahead of them a Portuguese sheepherder was trying to move a thousand
sheep across the road. Like a formless tide the sheep ebbed onto the highway
and then stood there motionless as the sheep dogs circled and barked. Hank
slowed the car and came to a stop a few feet from the closest sheep.
"Well, I'll be damned," Mike said. "That guy probably had all week to
get those sheep across the road and he has to pick the time when we
are passing. What's wrong with that crazy guy?" He glared out at the
sheepherder, his face working with anger. Suddenly he turned to Hank and
his face wore the wolfish raw grin that Hank hated. "It's like everything
else, Hank. You have to get out and fight for what's yours. I'll get us
through this god damn herd of sheep. Just follow close."
"Get back in the car, Mike," Hank yelled. "It will only take a few
minutes for them to cross the road."
Mike grinned back over his shoulder. He walked toward the sheep and
began kicking them. The sheep squealed in surprise, pushed sideways
and away from the car. Mike walked steadily forward, kicking, pushing,
cursing. The Portuguese sheepherder swore and shouted, the dogs barked
and ran in frantic circles. Slowly the Model-A with Mike leading the
way pushed through the dusty panicked herd of sheep. Finally they were
through the sheep and the road was open.
Mike got back into the car. His face was streaked with sweat and dust.
"That's the way to handle 'em, Hank," Mike said breathlessly. "Men,
women, sheep, horses and dogs all need to be pushed a little."
"And even if you're not in a hurry you have to get out and kick
them?" Hank asked. "Just to be kicking?"
"That's right, even if you're not in a hurry," Mike said. He looked
slyly sideways at Hank. "But, of course, I'm in a hurry."
"I know, I know," Hank said.
The car sped down the road and began the long climb into the brown soft
hills of the Coast Range.
CHAPTER 4
The Experiment
Mike got a job as a guinea pig the second month he was at Stanford. On
the bulletin board on the English Corner there was a sign that stated
that subjects for an important psychological experiment were wanted. The
pay was fifty cents an hour. The sign directed applicants to see Miss
Bird in the Psychology Department.
Mike saw Miss Bird and was hired. She told him where to report for
the experiment and the next afternoon he climbed to the top floor
of the Psychology Building. He walked down a long corridor lined
with rat cages. He could see hundreds of pink eyes glittering in the
semi-darkness and a wave of sound preceded him. It was the scurrying
of thousands of horny feet. The smell of the rats was thick and hot;
like rotted cereal. In one cage there were six rats with neat scars down
their skulls. Something had been cut out of their brains for they stayed
frozen in one position, unable to move, although their eyes glittered
wildly when Mike put his face close to their cage. One rat had been
placed with its forepaws tucked under its chin and it squatted on its
hind legs. Once it shivered as it tried to move and its eyes rolIed,
but it remained motionless . . . only its hair rippled.
Mike turned away and walked down to the room where the experiment was
being conducted. Two people were in the room and they were both wearing
long white coats. One was a middle-aged woman, the other was a young
man with protruding eyes.
"Are you Mr. Freesmith?" the man asked. "I'm Dr. Sutliff. This is
Dr. Urich."
Mike shook hands with both of them.
"Could you for the next week every afternoon be available?" Dr. Urich
said. She had a foreign accent and spoke very slowly. "Two hours every
afternoon?"
"Sure," Mike said.
They led him over to a large table at the end of the room. On the table
was a large black box with a naked electric light bulb protruding from the
top. There were two windows in the front of the box, one covered with a
red card, the other with a blue card. In the center of the machine was
a small funnel. Mike sat down at the chair in front of the apparatus.
"The object of the experiment is to see how many times you can cause
the light to go on," Dr. Urich said in a slow precise voice. Mike sensed
that this was a special voice, developed just for giving instructions to
subjects. "The light can be illuminated by pressing one or the other of
the two cards. Every five seconds a machine within the box automatically
changes the cards, giving you cards of different colors. It also changes
the window, which will close the circuit and cause the light to go on.
So every five seconds you will have a fresh choice. Each time you
illuminate the light a penny will drop out of the funnel. You may keep
all the pennies you earn. If they do not equal fifty cents an hour we
will make up the difference. Do you have any questions?"
finished their Tuesday lunch."
"Ya, ya, of course," Cohen breathed, "only the Rotary Club." His lips
curved into a smile although his eyes were brilliant with fear. He did
not relax until the last sound had left the street.
Hank was in Cohen's shop on a Fourth of July. Across town a band was
playing, firecrackers popped and a parade was beginning. The sounds
drifted lazily through the hot summer air, people put chairs on their
lawns to watch the parade pass, the pulse of the town was slow. Cohen
sat with the cloth close to his face, stitching rapidly and talking into
the cloth.
The parade rounded a corner far away and suddenly, by some odd refraction
of sound, in the tailor shop Hank and Cohen could hear the shuffling of
the parade, slow, steady, cadenced. The music stopped for a moment and
down the hot dead air of the town, caught between the unpainted buildings,
came the sound of marching feet. The sound of feet was not obscured by
the music, but was a raw, solid sound with a vitality of its own. Cohen
looked over the piece of cloth, his eyes glittered with terror. He put
the cloth down and stood up.
"I'm going for a, walk," he said and started for the rear door.
"I'll go with you," Hank said, but the tailor did not even hear him. He
walked quickly, staring straight ahead. He stumbled once over a sleeping
dog and swung his head vaguely toward it when it barked in pain. Hank
walked beside him. They were at the edge of town and still the sound of
the parade had not diminished, but seemed to throb and swell as if the
parade were growing in size. At some point Hank stopped thinking of it
as a parade and thought of it as a mob also.
They both walked faster and faster and when they got to the edge of town
they cut across a field of rye. They were almost running as they crossed
it and when he looked back Hank could see the erratic, zigzag path they
had left, as if two small and insane animals had passed through. They
splashed through a small creek and were oblivious of the mud that caked
on their shoes. At some point the sound of the parade died away and
they began to walk at a normal pace. Late that night they re-entered
the town and Hank went quietly to the railroad hotel.
Ever since that night Hank had known that he was a Jew. The crazy,
stumbling flight through the town and across the fields was a kind of
ritual; an initiation; the assumption of a burden; a primitive act of
faith. Hank was thirteen years old at the time.
Hank learned about love and the family from the girls at the hotel. Some
of them were plain dumpy girls who worked in restaurants or in stores and
others were simply whores, who wore flashy clothes very tight across the
hips. And the professionals wore furs that Hank could not forget. They were
skimpy fox pelts with the heads still attached. The jaws were strengthened
by a spring and each of the mouths bit into the tail of another and they
went over a woman's shoulder in an endless circle of biting foxes. Even
before he knew what the girls did in the upstairs rooms of the hotel
Hank hated them for the furs with the little glass eyes, tiny varnished
claws and red biting mouths.
The girls drifted into the hotel around nightfall. Some of them went
steady with one man; others simply sat in the lobby and waited for an
invitation. Because of the thinness of the walls, the open doors and the
loud voices, what went on in the rooms between men and women could not
be avoided. The sounds of it echoed in the corridors and the men talked
about it in the dining room so that to Hank it was like the Lysol smell
of the floors or the loose scabs of ancient paint on the outside ok the
hotel. It was part of the hotel; part of its dark smelly substance.
When he was eleven Hank had seen Old Kelly, the oldest engineer on the
line, beat up one of the girls. She had run out into the hall and Old
Kelly had caught her at the foot of the stairs. They had stood there,
both of them naked, Old Kelly hitting her the way men hit one another,
straight solid blows on the lumpy body of the woman. It made a sound
like someone kneading bread; not a slapping sound, but a dull, soggy,
damaging sound. The woman had scratched out at Old Kelly, but finally had
fallen forward into his arms, so that he could no longer hit her. Hank
had watched them make their stumbling broken way back to the room.
Once two of the girls, a little older than the rest, had stopped him in
the lobby. They were both very drunk and ready to cry. One had patted
him on the head and said, "A little boy I might have had." Hank had
knocked her hand away and backed off, angry. The two girls had cried,
looking hopelessly at one another and at Hank. Big tears soaked their
way through the powder and rouge and dropped pinkly and aimlessly from
their chins. Their grief had been so great that they had staggered out
into the night, without waiting for their railroaders to arrive.
By the time he was thirteen Hank was too big and gawky to sit in the
corners. They ran him out of the taxicab office and the pool hall and
Cohen asked him one day why he didn't get a job. The girls in the hotel
began to get angry with him for looking at them. Hank decided to go
to school.
Hank enrolled in the local high school. He was the best student they had
ever had. He finished the first two years of work in a single year. But
at the start of his senior year he discovered mathematics and poker and
quit school.
As soon as he learned mathematics in school, he began to calculate the
odds in the poker game that went on day after day down at the hotel. He
took a statistics textbook from the library and with the deck of cards
out in front of him he figured various combinations. He memorized columns
and columns of figures and odds and chances until gradually he forgot the
columns and knew by merely looking at a hand how it could be improved,
how it compared with other hands and how a kicker would help it. Then he
went down to the lobby where the men played poker and watched them. He
moved from one man to another, watching their hands, checking their
chances with his statistics. He noticed how some men place a chip over
an ace when it comes to them down; that few men look again at their
down card in stud if it is a face card; that most men swallow when they
make a good draw; that the time to win in a poker game is late in the
evenings when players are anxious to win back losings. The statistics
he had learned rapidly, but the way men play took longer. At the end of
a year he thought he knew enough to play.
One night he asked the men if he could play and they laughed and let him
in. He bought five dollars worth of chips, a little stack of white and
red, that when held between his fingers ran only up to his second knuckle.
He lost rapidly until he had only three white chips and one red chip left
in his fingers. Then he got over the confusion caused by the smoke over
the table, the eyes, the rapid flicking of the cards and he started to
win. He played cautiously, like a very stingy old man, and by midnight
he had won six dollars. He was sixteen years old.
After that he played three nights a week. He carefully calculated his
winnings from each man so that he never won enough from any one to anger
him. His winnings were steady and constant, never varying more than fifty
cents from the sum he predicted for the night. In a few months he had
five hundred dollars in a cigar box in his room. The cigar box bulged
with old tattered one-dollar bills, slick new fives, an occasional ten
and a pile of silver coins.
One day he heard a fireman state that the landlord's son was too good at
poker not to be a cheater. Several of the other men nodded agreement. That
night he got into the game on the first hand.
Carefully and very slowly he began to boost the bets. He made all of the
men commit themselves equally and by midnight a few of them were beginning
to sweat and the smoke around the shaded light was thick and yellow.
By three o'clock the pots were averaging over fifty dollars each. The eyes
around the table had turned red and the floor was littered with sandwich
crusts and empty whisky bottles. Hank had won four hundred dollars by
then. He went relentlessly after the rest and by dawn he had all the money
on the board and a note from one of the railroaders that he owed Hank
$66. Finally he played them for their change, for the nickels and dimes
in their pockets. He played one engineer for his Waltham and stuck it in
his pocket when he won. Some of the losers began to complain, but Hank
ignored them and went on playing. Toward the end he made such large bets
that even men with good hands could not afford to back up their cards.
When he had all of the visible money on the table, he said he was going
to the toilet and left the room. He went to his room, packed a wicker
suitcase full of clothes and climbed out a window. He walked to the
railroad yard and swung up into an empty boxcar. The next day he was in
Bismarck . . .
"Why did you come to Manual Arts High after all that?" Mike asked when
Hank was finished. "You could be a professional gambler."
"Too boring," Hank said. "Gambling is the hardest way in the world to
earn a living. Show me a gambler and I'll show you either a man bored
stiff or a knucklehead . . . or both."
"Do you ever hear from your father?"
"No. Not a word."
"Why don't you write him? I heard Jews were supposed to be great family
people . . . always taking care of one another and watching out for other
members of the family."
"Sure, Mike. You hear a lot of things that aren't so," Hank said and
grinned. "That's one of them. I'll tell you some more later."
A mile ahead of them a Portuguese sheepherder was trying to move a thousand
sheep across the road. Like a formless tide the sheep ebbed onto the highway
and then stood there motionless as the sheep dogs circled and barked. Hank
slowed the car and came to a stop a few feet from the closest sheep.
"Well, I'll be damned," Mike said. "That guy probably had all week to
get those sheep across the road and he has to pick the time when we
are passing. What's wrong with that crazy guy?" He glared out at the
sheepherder, his face working with anger. Suddenly he turned to Hank and
his face wore the wolfish raw grin that Hank hated. "It's like everything
else, Hank. You have to get out and fight for what's yours. I'll get us
through this god damn herd of sheep. Just follow close."
"Get back in the car, Mike," Hank yelled. "It will only take a few
minutes for them to cross the road."
Mike grinned back over his shoulder. He walked toward the sheep and
began kicking them. The sheep squealed in surprise, pushed sideways
and away from the car. Mike walked steadily forward, kicking, pushing,
cursing. The Portuguese sheepherder swore and shouted, the dogs barked
and ran in frantic circles. Slowly the Model-A with Mike leading the
way pushed through the dusty panicked herd of sheep. Finally they were
through the sheep and the road was open.
Mike got back into the car. His face was streaked with sweat and dust.
"That's the way to handle 'em, Hank," Mike said breathlessly. "Men,
women, sheep, horses and dogs all need to be pushed a little."
"And even if you're not in a hurry you have to get out and kick
them?" Hank asked. "Just to be kicking?"
"That's right, even if you're not in a hurry," Mike said. He looked
slyly sideways at Hank. "But, of course, I'm in a hurry."
"I know, I know," Hank said.
The car sped down the road and began the long climb into the brown soft
hills of the Coast Range.
CHAPTER 4
The Experiment
Mike got a job as a guinea pig the second month he was at Stanford. On
the bulletin board on the English Corner there was a sign that stated
that subjects for an important psychological experiment were wanted. The
pay was fifty cents an hour. The sign directed applicants to see Miss
Bird in the Psychology Department.
Mike saw Miss Bird and was hired. She told him where to report for
the experiment and the next afternoon he climbed to the top floor
of the Psychology Building. He walked down a long corridor lined
with rat cages. He could see hundreds of pink eyes glittering in the
semi-darkness and a wave of sound preceded him. It was the scurrying
of thousands of horny feet. The smell of the rats was thick and hot;
like rotted cereal. In one cage there were six rats with neat scars down
their skulls. Something had been cut out of their brains for they stayed
frozen in one position, unable to move, although their eyes glittered
wildly when Mike put his face close to their cage. One rat had been
placed with its forepaws tucked under its chin and it squatted on its
hind legs. Once it shivered as it tried to move and its eyes rolIed,
but it remained motionless . . . only its hair rippled.
Mike turned away and walked down to the room where the experiment was
being conducted. Two people were in the room and they were both wearing
long white coats. One was a middle-aged woman, the other was a young
man with protruding eyes.
"Are you Mr. Freesmith?" the man asked. "I'm Dr. Sutliff. This is
Dr. Urich."
Mike shook hands with both of them.
"Could you for the next week every afternoon be available?" Dr. Urich
said. She had a foreign accent and spoke very slowly. "Two hours every
afternoon?"
"Sure," Mike said.
They led him over to a large table at the end of the room. On the table
was a large black box with a naked electric light bulb protruding from the
top. There were two windows in the front of the box, one covered with a
red card, the other with a blue card. In the center of the machine was
a small funnel. Mike sat down at the chair in front of the apparatus.
"The object of the experiment is to see how many times you can cause
the light to go on," Dr. Urich said in a slow precise voice. Mike sensed
that this was a special voice, developed just for giving instructions to
subjects. "The light can be illuminated by pressing one or the other of
the two cards. Every five seconds a machine within the box automatically
changes the cards, giving you cards of different colors. It also changes
the window, which will close the circuit and cause the light to go on.
So every five seconds you will have a fresh choice. Each time you
illuminate the light a penny will drop out of the funnel. You may keep
all the pennies you earn. If they do not equal fifty cents an hour we
will make up the difference. Do you have any questions?"
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