“Ach, ja” the janitor called back. “Too soon oldt and too late schmardt.” Heller was a short dark Dutchman with solidly black hair though he was sixty. He wore rimless glasses that made him look more scholarly than most of the teachers in the building. His voice echoed after my father’s down the hollow length of the hall, which looked wet where light from a doorway or window lay on it. I was reassured, believing that nothing as absolute and awesome as death could enter a world where grown men could exchange such banalities. While my father waited, I ran to my locker in the annex hall and got my pea jacket and some books; I thought, wrongly, there might be some space in the coming hours when I could do some homework. As I returned to them I heard my father apologizing to Heller for, apparently, a few marks he had made on the floor. “No,” he said, “I hate to make the wonderful work you do any harder for you than it is. Don’t think I don’t appreciate what a job it is to keep this stockyard clean. It’s the Augean stable every day of the week.”
“Ah well,” Heller said, and shrugged. As I came closer, his black shape stooped, so the handle of the broom seemed to pierce it. He straightened and presented in the palm of his open hand, for my father’s and my inspection, a few dry oblongs bigger than ordinary dirt and not readily identifiable. “Seeds,” he said.
“What kid would be carrying seeds?” my father asked.
“Maybe from an orange?” Heller suggested.
“One goddam more mystery,” my father said, and he seemed to shy, and we went out into the weather.
The afternoon was clear and cold and the sun above the westward section of town made our shadows long before us. We seemed from our shadow to be a prancing one-headed creature with four legs. A trolley car went down the pike, its connective wheel sizzling and sparking on the wire, west ward into Alton. This was our ultimate direction; we were for the time being working against the tide. In striding silence, my steps three to his two, we passed the school’s side lawn. Some yards back from the pavement, there was a glass-fronted billboard. Miss Schrack’s senior art class made the posters for it; the present one displayed a great B painted in the school’s colors, maroon and gold, and announced:
BASKETBALL
TUESDAY
7 o’clock
We crossed the little irregular asphalt alley that separated the school property from Hummel’s Garage. Here the pavement was stained with little maps of dropped oil, islands and archipelagos and continents undiscovered on this globe. We passed the pumps, and passed the neat white house beside whose little porch a trellis supported the crucified brown skeleton of a rose-vine; in June this rose-vine bloomed and gave every boy who passed this way ambrosial thoughts of undressing Vera Hummel. Two doors further on was Minor’s Luncheonette. It shared a brick building with the Olinger Post Office. There were two plate-glass windows side by side: behind one of them fat Mrs. Passify, the post mistress, surrounded by Wanted posters and lists of postal regulations, doled out stamps and money-orders; behind the other, wreathed in adolescent smoke and laughter, Minor Kretz, also fat, scooped ice cream and concocted lemon Pepsis. The two establishments were symmetrically set up. Minor’s butterscotch-marble counter mirrored, through the dividing wall, Mrs. Passify’s barred windows and linoleum weighing-counter. As a child, I used to peek through the Local slot into the rear of the post office, seeing racks of sorted letters, stacked gray sacks, and one or two post men in blue pants, hats and coats off, engaging in an official-seeming clatter. Likewise, to me as a child, the older teen agers in the luncheonette seemed to slump in the back booths behind a screen of smoke whose slots permitted glimpses of a mysterious privacy as utterly forbidden to me as if by federal law. The pinball machine and the cancellation machine were twins of noise; where in the post office there was a small shelf bearing a dirty ruffle-edged blotter, a few splayed pens, and two dried bottles with gimcrack hinged mouths, in the luncheonette there was a small table offering for sale plastic cigarette cases, miniature gilt picture frames containing washed-out photographs of June Allyson and Yvonne de Carlo, playing cards with kittens and Scot-ties and cottages and lagoons on the back, and depraved 29# items like transparently loaded dice, celluloid pop eyes and buck teeth, dribble glasses, and painted plaster dog turds. Here you could buy, 2 for 5#, sepia postcards of the Olinger Town Hall, the business strip of the Alton Pike decked out with overhead lights and plywood candles for Christmas, the view from Shale Hill, the new water-chlorinating plant way up above Cedar Top, and the town Honor Roll, looking as it did during the war-of wood and always being newly lettered-, before they put up the little stone one bearing only the names of those who.had died. Here you could buy these cards, and next door, for a penny more, you could mail them; the symmetry, carried right down to the worn spots of the two floors and the heating pipes running along the opposing walls, was so perfect that as a child I had imagined that Mrs. Passify and Minor Kretz were secretly married. At night, and on Sunday mornings, when their windows were dark, the mirroring membrane between them dissolved and, filling the unified brick shell with one fat shopworn sigh, they meshed.
Here my father halted. In the brittle air his shoes scratched on the cement and his mouth moved like a puppet’s. “O.K., Peter,” he said. “You go into Minor’s and I’ll come back and pick you up when Doc Appleton’s done with me.”
“What do you think he’ll tell you?” I was tempted. Penny might be in the luncheonette.
“He’ll tell me I’m as healthy as a dumb old horse,” my father said, “and he’s as wise as a dirty old owl.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?”
“What can you do, you poor kid? Stay away and don’t depress yourself. Go see your friends, whoever the hell they think they are. I never had any friends, so I can’t imagine it.”
My conscience and my father were rarely on opposite sides; I compromised. “I’ll go in here,” I said. “For a minute, then I’ll catch up.”
“Take your time,” he said, with a sudden sweeping motion of his hand, as if remembering that unseen audience before which he was an actor. “You got lots of time to kill. At your age I had so much time to kill my hands are still bloody.” His talk was unreeling wider and wider; I felt chilled.
Walking off alone, he seemed lightened and looked thinner. Perhaps all men look thinner from the back. I wished that for my sake he would buy a respectable coat. As I watched, he took the knit cap out of his pocket and put it on his head; pierced by embarrassment, I ran up the steps, bucked the door, and plunged into the luncheonette.
It was a maze, Minor’s place. So many bodies: yet only a tiny section of the school ever came here. Others had other places; the set at Minor’s was the most criminal and it thrilled me to be, however marginally, a part of it. I felt in this clouded interior a powerful secret lurking, whose nostrils exhaled the smoke and whose hide exuded the warmth. The voices jostling in the stable-warmth all seemed to be gossiping about the same thing, some event that had happened in the minute before I arrived; I was haunted at that age by the suspicion that a wholly different world, gaudy and momentous, was enacting its myths just around the corners of my eyes. I pushed my way through the bodies as if through the leaves of a close-set series of gates. I picked my way past one, two, three booths and there, yes, there, she was. She.
Why is it, love, that faces we love look upon each re-meeting so fresh, as if our hearts have in this instant again minted them? How can I describe her to you justly? She was small and not unusual. Her lips were too plump and irksomely self-satisfied; her nose rather cursory and nervous. Her eyelids were vaguely Negroid, heavy, puffy, bluish, and incongruously worldly-wise when taken with the startled grassy innocence of her eyes. I believe it was these incongruities-between lips and nose, eyes and lids-these soft and silent clashes like the reticulating ripples hinting in the flow of a stream of irregular depths, that made her beauty for me; this delicate irresolution of feature held out the possibility of her being worthy of me. And made her seem always a bit unexpected. She was occupying one side of a booth and there was space beside her. Across the table, two ninth-graders she dimly knew, a girl and a boy, were tugging at each other’s buttons, blind to everything. She was gazing at them and did not see me until my body, easing in, pushed hers. “Peter!” I unbuttoned my pea jacket so the devil-may-care flame of my shirt showed. “Give me a cigarette.”