To me he said, “You go home, boy, home to your mother.” We had to stop or else bump into him. “This is my son,” my father said.
The drunk turned from me to him So quickly all his clothes fluffed up like feathers. He seemed to be not so much dressed as shingled in rags, layer on layer of torn multi-textured scraps. His voice was like that, too, hoarse and broken and indefinitely soft. “How can you lie?” he said sadly to my father. “How can you lie about a thing so serious? Now let this boy go home to his mother.”
“That’s where I’m trying to take him,” my father said. “But the damn car won’t start.”
“He’s my father,” I said, hoping this would make the drunk go away. But it brought him closer to us. His face under the blue streetlight seemed splashed with purple. “Don’t lie for him,” he said with exquisite gentleness. “He’s not worth it. How much is he giving you? I don’t care how much it is, it’s never enough. When he gets a new pretty boy he’ll throw you out on the street like an old Trojan.”
“Daddy, let’s go,” I said, frightened now, and chilled clear through. The night went in one side of me and came out the other and encountered no obstacle.
My father began to push around him and the drunk lifted his hand and my father in answer lifted his own hand. This made the drunk take a back step and he nearly fell. “Knock me down,” the drunk said, smiling so broadly his cheeks gleamed. “Knock me down when I want to save your soul. Are you ready to die?” This made my father jerk still like a halted movie. The drunk, seeing his triumph, repeated, “Are you ready to die?”
The drunk nimbly sidestepped to me and put his arm around my waist and gave me a hug. His breath was like the odor the seniors taking chemistry sometimes left in Room 107 before we came in for Thursday study hall-a complex stench both sulphurous and sweet. “Ah,” he told me, “you’re a good warm body. But you’re all skin and bone. Doesn’t the old bastard feed you? Hey, you,” he called to my father, “what sort of an old lech do you call yourself lifting these poor boys off the street with empty stomachs?”
“I thought I was ready to die,” my father said, “but now I wonder if anybody ever is. I wonder now if a ninety-nine year-old Chinaman with tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, and toothache is ready to die.”
The drunk’s fingers began to gouge under my ribs and I jerked out of his grasp. “Daddy, let’s go.”
“No, Peter,” my father said, “this gentleman is talking sense. Are you ready to die?” he asked the drunk. “What do you think the answer is?”
Squinting, shoulders back, chest preening, the drunk with pigeon dignity stepped into my father’s tall shadow and, looking up, told him carefully, “I’ll be ready to die when you and everybody like you is locked up in jail and they throw away the key. You can’t even let these poor kids rest on a night like this.” He looked over at me under frowning eyebrows and said, “Shall we call the cops, kid? Let’s kill this old nance, huh?” To my father he said, “What about it, chief? How much is it worth to you not to have me call the cops and have you picked up with this flower?” He inflated his chest as if to shout, but the street dwindled northward toward infinity without upholding another visible soul-just the painted brick fronts with the little railed porches characteristic of Alton, the stone stoops now and then bearing an ornamented cement flower-pot, the leafless curbside trees alternating and in the end mixing with the telephone poles. Parked cars lined this street but few passed down it because it met a dead end at the Essick’s factory wall two blocks away. We stood beside the long low cement-block back of a brewery warehouse; its corrugated green doors had slammed tight shut and the memory of the clang seemed to make the air here hard. The drunk began to pluck at my father’s chest, rubbing his thumb and fingers after each pluck as if disposing of a louse or a piece of lint. “Ten dollars,” he said. “Ten dollars and my mouth is”-he pressed three blue fingers against his swollen violet lips and held them there as if testing how long he could hold his breath. At last he lifted them away, exhaled a huge feather of frozen vapor, smiled, and said, “So. Ten dollars buys me, lock, stock, and barrel.” He winked at me and asked, “Is that a bargain, kid, or not? What’s he paying you?”
“He’s my father,” I insisted, frantic. My father was kneading his spotted hands together under the lamplight and the uprightness of his posture seemed a stiffness, as if he had been poleaxed and in the next instant would fall.
“Five dollars,” the drunk quickly said to him, “five lousy dollars,” and without waiting for an answer he dropped to, “one. One little bitty dollar bill so I can get myself a drink and stop freezing to death. Come on, chief, give me a break. I’ll even tell you a hotel where they don’t ask any questions.”
“I know all about hotels,” my father said. “In the Depression I took a job as night clerk at the old Osiris, before they closed it down. The bedbugs got to be as big as the prostitutes so the customers couldn’t tell ‘em apart. I guess the Osiris was before your time.”
The drunk lost his grin. “I come from Easton originally,” he said. It occurred to me with a shock that he was much younger than my father; indeed he was virtually a boy like me.
My father dug into his pocket and brought out some change and gave it to the young man. “I’d like to give you more, my friend, but I just don’t have it. This is my last thirty-five cents. I’m a public school teacher and our pay scale is way behind that of industry. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, though, and I’d like to shake your hand.” And he did. “You’ve clarified my thinking,” he told the drunk.
My father turned and walked back the way we had come, and I hurried to follow. The things we had been trying to reach-the black car, the sandstone house, my distant and by now, surely, intensely worried mother-tugged like weights within my skin, which seemed stretched transparent by starlight and madness. Walking this way we met the wind-that had arisen, and a glass mask of cold was clipped onto my face. Behind us, the drunk kept calling, like an eagle muffled in a storm, “You’re O.K.! You’re O.K.!”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To a hotel,” my father said. “That man brought me to my senses. We gotta get you into where it’s warm. You’re my pride and joy, kid; we gotta guard the silver. You need sleep.”
“We must call Mother,” I said. “Right you are,” he said. “Right you are.” The repetition left me with the impression that he wouldn’t do it.
We turned left into Weiser Street. The wealth of neon there made the air seem warmer. One place was grilling hot dogs in the window. Figures liquid in the light poured past, shoulders hunched, faces hid. But they were people and their existing at all exhilarated me, came to me as a blessing and a permission to live myself. My father turned into a narrow doorway I had never noticed. Inside, up six steps and through a blank double door, a surprisingly high open space contained a desk and an elevator cage and some massive stairs and a few frayed chairs all sunk in on themselves and creased. On the left a kind of screen of potted plants held voices and a systematic clink of glass on glass, like a flat bell ringing. There was an odor I had not smelled since, as a child, I would be sent on a Sunday evening to buy a paper pail of oysters at the place, half-restaurant, half-general store, called Mohnie’s. Mohnie was a great sluggish Dutchman in a buttoned black sweater and his place was a whitewashed stone house that had stood here along the pike when the town was called Tilden. A bell rang when you pushed open the door and rang again when it shut behind you. Glum counters of exotic candies and tobaccos ran along one wall and in the rest of the space square tables with oilcloth tablecloths waited for supper customers. In the meantime a few old men sat in the chairs, and I had supposed that the smell of the place was something they brought in with them. There was chewing tobacco in it, and wrinkled shoe leather, and wood cured in dust, and the oysters themselves; carrying the slippery little pail home, its top cleverly folded like a napkin at Sunday dinner, was like stealing a section of Mohnie’s air; I used to feel that I was trailing behind me in the bluish evening air a faint brownish trail, a flavor of oysters that made the trees and houses of the pike subaqueous. Now here the smell was again, fresh.