Jack (Gilead #4)(43)
He didn’t look up when the librarian came into the room, but he could smell the bologna in the sandwich that, yes, she set on the table by his elbow.
“Frost is good,” she said. “Williams is shelved in the W’s.”
“Yes. Thank you.” So he read some Frost out of loyalty to the pretense, then began to think that these poems might neutralize the effect of Williams if on another reading he decided Paterson might seem crude to her. The thought was a relief, even though nothing would come of it. He stayed long enough to have a reasonable hope the lady’s shift had ended, but there she was, and there he was, with the two books tucked under his belt, a very insecure arrangement that could well embarrass him to actual death.
She didn’t even look up. She said, “Remember to bring that back sometime.” That, singular. So he had actually gotten away with the theft of one of them, and he took a kind of satisfaction in the thought. The other one she had in effect lent him, which is what librarians are paid to do. It bothered him that he didn’t know which was which, but it didn’t bother him much.
* * *
A week and two days had passed. He had run a thousand plans through his mind, thinking what he would do if the desk clerk at the rooming house decided to make an issue about whether he had been paid or not, whether that twenty was legal tender. He should have asked for more than a five back. He was afraid at the time that worse might come to worst and he would have to come up with five bucks at a minimum to even hope he could mollify the fellow. So he spent what money he had so unwillingly it was almost another form of not having any. When had he last thought of that word “mollify”? “Emollient.” Association. Would he think differently if he thought in different words? He could dignify true nonsense, to his own satisfaction, in any case. A smaller vocabulary would keep him on a narrower path, no doubt limit these irksome divagations a little. Where did that one come from?
He had been as quiet as he could be for nine days, had gone downstairs only when very necessary, had read Robert Frost. Or he did until the clerk came upstairs, opened his door, and looked in at him there with his book. “Still alive,” he said. There was a misleading raucousness in a rooming house, where, in fact, many a turbulent soul was, so to speak, silently coming to the end of his rope, or belt or electrical cord, or whatever. The clerk especially hated that kind of problem. It was best handled expeditiously. He had noticed the patch of silence in the thick of pandemonium and had come to check, confident enough of what he might find not to bother knocking.
Jack said, “Still alive.”
The clerk laughed. “To tell the truth, I had a bet with a guy about whether you sleep with your hat on.” And he went away.
Very funny. But the joke made him uncomfortably conscious that he did, in certain moods, sleep with his shoes on. When he dreamed of the return of Bradshaw. Or the police, always so eager to be confirmed in their suspicions, to bring the universal solvent of official attention to bear on every hapless thing until it was all just evidence, patently incriminating. But then, once he dreamed that the police did come and find him with the blanket over his head and his two shod feet sticking out at the bottom of the bed. His mattress was a few inches short, a fact to which he had, until then, been resigned. How better to pique that officious curiosity? The worst thing about the cops was when they couldn’t help laughing. With judges it was even worse. He had to get some sort of control of his life.
Why? The point of all this was to stay alive as long as decency required. He thought it would be the considerate thing to minimize so far as possible the signs of struggle with futility and despair and that sort of thing, so that when Teddy and whoever else came to fetch him home they would be able to say, Yes, that is absolutely our brother Jack, that is just how he knotted his tie. There might be something to the idea of sleeping with his hat on, his shoes, for that matter. Then he would appear so lifelike, as they say, that their grief would be mingled with suspicion. Teddy would lay his cool, professional fingers on his throat, just to be sure. And Jack, which was a name he had for his soul, would even then be falling through uncanny voids and starry abysses toward perdition.
In the meantime, a man who stood six foot two in his socks could not sustain life on the occasional bologna sandwich. He did not want to fail at the one object he had set for himself, which was to stay alive until the next black-bordered envelope arrived, until Teddy pulled up in front of the wrong rooming house to offer him a ride home if he could find him.
Then he decided enough time had passed to make it worthwhile to check at the old rooming house, to see if Teddy had left money there for him. So he strolled the few blocks to the old place, and the man at the desk took an unsealed envelope from the cash drawer and handed it to him without a word, but with that old injured look that let Jack know he couldn’t quite approve of the arrangement. He’d have had more respect for a thief, no doubt being one himself. Oh well. Jack put the money in his pocket, thanked the man with a cordiality meant to exasperate, and went off to buy himself a newer shirt.
* * *
It was feeling a little solvent and respectable that made him walk into a bar one night, to have one drink and listen to the piano. He had two drinks, waiting for the piano player to show up. Then he went over and started tinkering with the keys. Someone shouted “Tennessee Waltz!” so he sat down and played it, and someone shouted “Cool Water!” so he played that, and “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “The Tennessee Waltz” again. Someone put a glass with change in it on the piano, then a glass of whiskey, and he played “My heart knows what the wild goose knows” and sang along. Then someone shouted “The Horst Wessel Song,” which had been set to an old hymn tune his father liked, a perfectly good hymn, and out of drunken happiness at the coincidence, he fingered a few bars. There was a silence and then a blow to the back of his head that landed him on the floor somehow. He made the mistake of standing up temporarily, intending to explain, he was quite sure, but he was punched in the face before he could compose his thoughts. When his head cleared a little, he stepped into the kitchen and out through the door to the alley. The tumult inside went on without him. Just those few notes were incitement enough to make up for the lack of an antagonist. He had heard the glass with the money in it hit the floor and the coins scatter. Oh well. Here he was, alone in an alley, bleeding again. He would have to sacrifice his handkerchief to his necktie. What a ridiculous life.