The new and frigid air of November lay on Francis like a blanket of glass. Its weight rendered him motionless and brought peace to his body, and the stillness brought a cessation of anguish to his brain. In a dream he was only just beginning to enter, horns and mountains rose up out of the earth, the horns-ethereal, trumpets-sounding with a virtuosity equal to the perilousness of the crags and cornices of the mountainous pathways. Francis recognized the song the trumpets played and he floated with its melody. Then, yielding not without trepidation to its coded urgency, he ascended bodily into the exalted reaches of the world where the song had been composed so long ago. And he slept.
IV
Francis stood in the junkyard driveway, looking for old Rosskam. Gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks blew swiftly past the early-morning sun, the world shimmered in a sudden blast of incandescence, and Francis blinked. His eyes roved over a cemetery of dead things: rusted-out gas stoves, broken wood stoves, dead iceboxes, and bicycles with twisted wheels. A mountain of worn-out rubber tires cast its shadow on a vast plain of rusty pipes, children’s wagons, toasters, automobile fenders. A three-sided shed half a block long sheltered a mountain range of cardboard, paper, and rags.
Francis stepped into this castoff world and walked toward a wooden shack, small and tilted, with a swayback horse hitched to a four-wheeled wooden wagon in front of it. Beyond the wagon a small mountain of wagon wheels rose alongside a sprawling scatter of pans, cans, irons, pots, and kettles, and a sea of metal fragments that no longer had names.
Francis saw probably Rosskam, framed in the shack’s only window, watching him approach. Francis pushed open the door and confronted the man, who was short, filthy, and sixtyish, a figure of visible sinew, moon-faced, bald, and broad-chested, with fingers like the roots of an oak tree.
“Howdy,” Francis said.
“Yeah,” said Rosskam.
“Preacher said you was lookin’ for a strong back.”
“It could be. You got one, maybe?”
“Stronger than some.”
“You can pick up an anvil?”
“You collectin’ anvils, are you?”
“Collect everything.”
“Show me the anvil.”
“Ain’t got one.”
“Then I’d play hell pickin’ it up.”
“How about the barrel. You can pick that up?”
He pointed to an oil drum, half full of wood scraps and junk metal. Francis wrapped his arms around it and lifted it, with difficulty.
“Where’d you like it put?”
“Right where you got it off.”
“You pick up stuff like this yourself?” Francis asked.
Rosskam stood and lifted the drum without noticeable strain, then held it aloft.
“You got to be in mighty fair shape, heftin’ that,” said Francis. “That’s one heavy item.”
“You call this heavy?” Rosskam said, and he heaved the drum upward and set its bottom edge on his right shoulder. Then he let it slide to chest level, hugged it, and set it down.
“I do a lifetime of lifting,” he said.
“I see that clear. You own this whole shebang here?”
“All. You still want to work?”
“What are you payin’?”
“Seven dollar. And work till dark.”
“Seven. That ain’t much for back work.”
“Some might even bite at it.”
“It’s worth eight or nine.”
“You got better, take it. People feed families all week on seven dollar.”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Seven.”
“All right, what the hell’s the difference?”
“Get up the wagon.”
Two minutes in the moving wagon told Francis his tailbone would be grieving by day’s end, if it lasted that long. The wagon bounced over the granite blocks and the trolley tracks, and the men rode side by side in silence through the bright streets of morning. Francis was glad for the sunshine, and felt rich seeing the people of his old city rising for work, opening stores and markets, moving out into a day of substance and profit. Clearheadedness always brought optimism to Francis; a long ride on a freight when there was nothing to drink made way for new visions of survival, and sometimes he even went out and looked for work. But even as he felt rich, he felt dead. He had not found Helen and he had to find her. Helen was lost again. The woman makes a goddamn career out of being lost. Probably went to mass someplace. But why didn’t she come back to the mission for coffee, and for Francis? Why the hell should Helen always make Francis feel dead?
Then he remembered the story about Billy in the paper and he brightened. Pee Wee read it first and gave it to him. It was a story about Francis’s son Billy, written by Martin Daugherty, the newspaperman, who long ago lived next door to the Phelans on Colonie Street. It was the story of Billy getting mixed up in the kidnapping of the nephew of Patsy McCall, the boss of Albany’s political machine. They got the nephew back safely, but Billy was in the middle because he wouldn’t inform on a suspected kidnapper. And there was Martin’s column defending Billy, calling Patsy McCall a very smelly bag of very small potatoes for being rotten to Billy.
“So how do you like it?” Rosskam said.
“Like what?” said Francis.
“Sex business,” Rosskam said. “Women stuff.”
“I don’t think much about it anymore.”
“You bums, you do a lot of dirty stuff up the heinie, am I right?”
“Some like it that way. Not me.”
“How do you like it?”
“I don’t even like it anymore, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m over the hill.”
“A man like you? How old? Fifty-five? Sixty-two?”
“Fifty-eight,” said Francis.
“Seventy-one here,” said Rosskam. “I go over no hills. Four, five times a night I get it in with the old woman. And in the daylight, you never know.”
“What’s the daylight?”
“Women. They ask for it. You go house to house, you get offers. This is not a new thing in the world.”
“I never went house to house,” Francis said.
“Half my life I go house to house,” said Rosskam, “and I know how it is. You get offers.”
“You probably get a lot of clap, too.”
“Twice all my life. You use the medicine, it goes away. Those ladies, they don’t do it so often to get disease. Hungry is what they got, not clap.”
“They bring you up to bed in your old clothes?”
“In the cellar. They love it down the cellar. On the woodpile. In the coal. On top the newspapers. They follow me down the stairs and bend over the papers to show me their bubbies, or they up their skirts on the stairs ahead of me, showing other things. Best I ever got lately was on top of four ash cans. Very noisy, but some woman. The things she said you wouldn’t repeat. Hot, hotsy, oh my. This morning we pay her a visit, up on Arbor Hill. You wait in the wagon. It don’t take long, if you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind? It’s your wagon, you’re the boss.”
“That’s right. I am the boss.”
They rode up to Northern Boulevard and started down Third Street, all downhill so as not to kill the horse. House by house they went, carting out old clocks and smashed radios, papers always, two boxes of broken-backed books on gardening, a banjo with a broken neck, cans, old hats, rags.
“Here,” old Rosskam said when they reached the hot lady’s house. “If you like, watch by the cellar window. She likes lookers and I don’t mind it.”
Francis shook his head and sat alone on the wagon, staring down Third Street. He could have reconstructed this street from memory. Childhood, young manhood were passed on the streets of Arbor Hill, girls discovering they had urges, boys capitalizing on this discovery. In the alleyways the gang watched women undress, and one night they watched the naked foreplay of Mr. and Mrs. Ryan until they put out the light. Joey Kilmartin whacked off during that show. The old memory aroused Francis sexually. Did he want a woman? No. Helen? No, no. He wanted to watch the Ryans again, getting ready to go at it. He climbed down from the wagon and walked into the alley of the house where Rosskam’s hot lady lived. He walked softly, listening, and he heard groaning, inaudible words, and the sound of metal fatigue. He crouched down and peered in the cellar window at the back of the house, and there they were on the ash cans, Rosskam’s pants hanging from his shoes, on top of a lady with her dress up to her neck. When Francis brought the scene into focus, he could hear their words.