Things as They Are (4 page)

“I tell him the name’s King, not Jed. He says, ‘King? King of what? King Shit of Turd Island?’

“I warn him if he’s looking for trouble he’s come to the right place. ‘When I finish with you, sunshine,’ I says, ‘you won’t
know if your ass’s been punched or bored.’ ‘What’s that,’ he says, ‘faggot talk?’ I show him my fist. He thinks this is funny. For kids like him, old people are just somebody you knock over getting on and off buses. I never took shit from anybody my whole life. I’m going to start now?”

“So you popped him.”

“Goddamn right I popped him.”

“With the putter.”

“No putter. I give him the knuckle sandwich.”

“From what I heard, the kid and his girlfriend claim you hit him with the putter.”

“Conflicting testimony. What’s he going to say, he gets laid out by a seventy-eight year old with a hip replacement? Lila seen it. She told the cops I punched him.”

“Lila also said he pushed you first. I didn’t hear you say that.”

“Lila’s a good girl. The fucking law is all technicalities. There’s no self-defence unless he pushes me first.”

“So she lied.”

“Lila saw what Lila saw.”

“His father threatened to sue, didn’t he? For chipping the kid’s tooth?”

“Jesus, can you believe it? I’m supposed to pay for the milk he didn’t buy the kid? I told the bastard if he bought the kid a little milk to drink, his teeth wouldn’t chip so easy.”

“You shouldn’t have done it, King. It’s a different world now.”

“You’re glad I done it. The story of my life. Guys like you waiting for me to do what you shit-eaters don’t dare.”

Those moods of King’s that Elsie and I feared would never lift, when they did, they lifted like spring comes to this part of the world, in a rush, ice to water. Saturday was the day he picked for thawing, the day the farmers came to town. “All work and no play makes King a dull boy,” he would say, signalling the
change which was coming over him. When she heard that, Elsie would phone the hotel to let me know she believed her husband, my brother, was back. He wasn’t going in to work that Saturday.

King was a most particular man about his appearance, especially strutting Saturdays. Polishing shoes, brushing a hat, ironing a suit, dress shirt, and tie, occupied the morning. Then his shining self, new-made, a page out of
Esquire
, set off with Sonny to bless the afternoon. First stop, The China Lily Cafe, to buy two dozen cigars.

Rumours of King in pin-stripes rustles up a mob of kids. They swarm all over the steps of The Lily, elbow their way to the windows, peer in, whisper excitedly. The door swings open and they part like the Red Sea did for Moses, watch him pass in a hush. Silent as ghosts, they close ranks at his heels and trot down the hot sidewalks after him, a pack of hunting dogs. King doesn’t give them a glance.

He stops at a cluster of farmers braced against car fenders and hoods, riding their boots on bumpers. Cigars all around. King’s head tosses back with a stogie clenched in strong teeth, eye on the sky, prophesying the weather. There’s nothing the man isn’t expert on, women, livestock, cards, baseball, the grain exchange. Thumb in the ribs, hand clapped on the shoulder, sly wink to the sweet young thing in the sun-dress. And behind him the farmers’ kids shyly edge in. They’ve never seen anything like him before, these little ones that count themselves lucky if they get a suck on a Coke or a box of Lucky Elephant Popcorn once a week. Their daddies are nothing like this daddy, they squeeze a nickel until the beaver shits and pile chores on their skinny shoulders to make the point life isn’t cake and ice cream, not entirely.

King tips his hat, nods and smiles, asks after the missus and the crops in this heat.
Life’s a bitch! Have a cigar!
He’s on the move, there’s life in those legs now, he stretches them out and seems to drag everybody along with him. He bustles in and out of stores scattering money, buying articles of no earthly use, a
cheap harmonica, a pen and pencil set, last Christmas’s artificial mistletoe, a rubber gorilla mask, chocolates, a water pistol, all this crazy spending driving up the excitement in the children the same way heat drives up mercury in a thermometer. Down one side of Main Street and up the other, more handshakes, winks, smiles, whistles. More stores, more everything. Then all at once, instead of more, there’s no more. No more room in Sonny’s arms for one more parcel, the last cigar gone.

The kids stand staring at him, biting their lips. King looks back at them in amazement, as if he has never laid eyes on them before. Who are they? And he turns to Sonny and asks in a loud, surprised voice, “Why, Sonny, I never knew you were so popular. Who are all your friends?”

Sonny, who hardly knows any of them from Adam because most of them are country kids, shrugs and shifts from foot to foot, awkward and embarrassed. For the others, everything hangs in the balance, like when Peter was asked whether he knew this Christ fellow. They hold their breath and their eyes flit from son to father, father to son. King’s got his wallet out and is studying its insides. He looks in the wallet and looks at them, looks at them and looks in the wallet. A slow smile creases his face and he says, “Ice cream floats on Sonny! Floats on Sonny Walsh, the farmers’ friend!”

That’s the signal for all hell to break loose. They go stampeding up the street yelping and whooping, pushing and shoving each other in the race to get to the Chinaman’s first. Ambling along in the rear comes King, lord of the manor. In The Lily he buys five dollars’ worth of floats and french fries, enough to keep them eating until they puke, and distributes some of that cheap treasure he collected on Main Street to his admirers. This gets the noise level somewhere close to where he requires it but not all the way to the top so he feeds a few quarters into the juke box and cuts the rug with the waitresses while Lee cooks him an order of rare steak and mushroom fried rice. The mushroom fried rice is stomach liner for what
comes next. Because what comes next is one rip of a blind drunk.

It generally fell to me to escort him home after one of these twelve-hour-long escapades, toting whichever of his parcels he hadn’t lost or given away, steering him up the darkened street to patient Elsie. I remember one night when I got him to his door and he wouldn’t go in. King had something to say to me. “I make mistakes,” he confessed in a thick mutter. “Sometimes I’m not sure who I am. I ain’t smart and I ain’t rich. But I am big. Wasn’t I the biggest thing in the street today? Nobody’s bigger than King Walsh. Am I right or am I wrong?”

I said he was right. It was one o’clock in the morning and I had a headache.

King called. Myra had parked the car outside Putt ’N’ Fun Town the other day and spied him going in there. Sonny got hot to trot, laid down an ultimatum. “Act your age. Shape up or ship out,” he told King. I think King’s the shape he is and it’s too late to change him. I don’t know how this is going to end.

Nobody in the city knows King. He is not used to streets so long and wide. He’s an old man and we old men grow smaller, not bigger, before we die. King prefers a street he can fill, a narrow little street where he can look out over the roofs into the distance to an admiring woman calling and waving to him. He’s running after the life he had. So toll that bell in the steeple, King. Ring it, brother, make a big noise. We’re all of us going to be quiet a long, long time.

FOLLOWING HIS FATHER’S DEATH
, Joseph Kelsey discovered, in his bereavement, a passion for horses. Joseph’s passion for horses was not of the same character as the old man’s had been; Joseph’s was searching, secretive, concerned with lore, confined to books. It was not love. When his wife asked him what he was doing, staying up so late night after night, he said he was working on an article. Joseph was a professor of history.

The article was a lie. He was reading about horses.

A good horse sholde have three propyrtees of a man, three of a woman, three of a foxe, three of a hare, and three of an asse
.

Joseph was born in a poor, backward town to a couple reckoned to be one of the poorest and most backward. It was a world of outhouses, chicken coops in backyards, eyeglasses purchased from Woolworth’s, bad teeth that never got fixed. On the afternoon of October 29, 1949, when his mother’s water broke his father ran down the lane to get Pepper Carmichael to drive them to the hospital. Rupert Kelsey didn’t own
an automobile, not even a rusted collection of rattles like Pepper’s.

What Rupert Kelsey owned was seven horses. Horses slipped and slid through his fingers like quicksilver. When he was flush he bought more, when funds ran low he sold off one or two. Horses came and horses went in a continual parade, bays and sorrels, blacks and greys, chestnuts and roans, pintos and piebalds. His wife was jealous of them.

There was trouble with Joseph’s birth right from the start. The hospital, staffed mostly by nuns, was tiny and antiquated, as backward as the town. Rupert Kelsey sat in the waiting room for an hour, and then a sister came out and told him they had telephoned everywhere but the doctor couldn’t be found. It was understood what that meant. The doctor was either drunk – not an uncommon occurrence – or was off playing poker somewhere without having left a number where he could be reached. Rupert nodded solemnly and the nun left, face as starchy as her wimple.