When the bus stopped at the corner of Broadway and Columbia Street, the corner where that infamous trolley was caught between flaming bedsheets, Aldo Campione boarded. He was clad in a white flannel suit, white shirt, and white necktie, and his hair was slicked down with brilliantine. Francis knew instantly that this was not the white of innocence but of humility. The man had been of low birth, low estate, and committed a low crime that had earned him the lowliest of deaths in the dust. Over there on the other side they must’ve give him a new suit. And here he came down the aisle and stopped at the seats where Rudy and Francis sat. He reached out his hand in a gesture to Francis that was ambiguous. It might have been a simple Abruzzian greeting. Or was it a threat, or a warning? It might have been an offer of belated gratitude, or even a show of compassion for a man like Francis who had lived long (for him), suffered much, and was inching toward death. It might have been a gesture of grace, urging, or even welcoming Francis into the next. And at this thought, Francis, who had raised his hand to meet Aldo’s, withdrew it.
“I ain’t shakin’ hands with no dead horse thief,” he said.
“I ain’t no horse thief,” Rudy said.
“Well you look like one,” Francis said.
By then the bus was at Madison Avenue and Broadway, and Rudy and Francis stepped out into the frosty darkness of six o’clock on, the final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.
o o o
In the dust and sand of a grassless vacant lot beside the Mission of Holy Redemption, a human form lay prostrate under a lighted mission window. The sprawl of the figure arrested Francis’s movement when he and Rudy saw it. Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead. This one belonged to a woman who seemed to be doing the dead man’s float in the dust: face down, arms forward, legs spread.
“Hey,” Rudy said as they stopped. “That’s Sandra.”
“Sandra who?” said Francis.
“Sandra There-ain’t-no-more. She’s only got one name, like Helen. She’s an Eskimo.”
“You dizzy bastard. Everybody’s an Eskimo or a Cherokee.”
“No, that’s the straight poop. She used to work up in Alaska when they were buildin’ roads.”
“She dead?”
Rudy bent down, picked up Sandra’s hand and held it. Sandra pulled it away from him.
“No,” Rudy said, “she ain’t dead.”
“Then you better get up outa there, Sandra,” Francis said, “or the dogs’ll eat your ass off.”
Sandra didn’t move. Her hair streamed out of her inertness, long, yellow-white wisps floating in the dust, her faded and filthy cotton housedress twisted above the back of her knees, revealing stockings so full of holes and runs that they had lost their integrity as stockings. Over her dress she wore two sweaters, both stained and tattered. She lacked a left shoe. Rudy bent over and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hey Sandra, it’s me, Rudy. You know me?”
“Hnnn,” said Sandra.
“You all right? You sick or anything, or just drunk?”
“Dnnn,” said Sandra.
“She’s just drunk,” Rudy said, standing up. “She can’t hold it no more. She falls over.”
“She’ll freeze there and the dogs’ll come along and eat her ass off,” Francis said.
“What dogs?” Rudy asked.
“The dogs, the dogs. Ain’t you seen them?”
“I don’t see too many dogs. I like cats. I see a lotta cats.”
“If she’s drunk she can’t go inside the mission,” Francis said.
“That’s right,” said Rudy. “She comes in drunk, he kicks her right out. He hates drunk women more’n he hates us.”
“Why the hell’s he preachin’ if he don’t preach to people that need it?”
“Drunks don’t need it,” Rudy said. “How’d you like to preach to a room full of bums like her?”
“She a bum or just on a heavy drunk?”
“She’s a bum.”
“She looks like a bum.”
“She’s been a bum all her life.”
“No,” said Francis. “Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.”
“She was a whore before she was a bum.”
“And what about before she was a whore?”
“I don’t know,” Rudy said. “She just talks about whorin’ in Alaska. Before that I guess she was just a little kid.”
“Then that’s somethin’. A little kid’s somethin’ that ain’t a bum or a whore.”
Francis saw Sandra’s missing shoe in the shadows and retrieved it. He set it beside her left foot, then squatted and spoke into her left ear.
“You gonna freeze here tonight, you know that? Gonna be frost, freezin’ weather. Could even snow. You hear? You oughta get yourself inside someplace outa the cold. Look, I slept the last two nights in the weeds and it was awful cold, but tonight’s colder already than it was either of them nights. My hands is half froze and I only been walkin’ two blocks. Sandra? You hear what I’m sayin’? If I got you a cup of hot soup would you drink it? Could you? You don’t look like you could but maybe you could. Get a little hot soup in, you don’t freeze so fast. Or maybe you wanna freeze tonight, maybe that’s why you’re layin’ in the goddamn dust. You don’t even have any weeds to keep the wind outa your ears. I like them deep weeds when I sleep outside. You want some soup?”
Sandra turned her head and with one eye looked up at Francis.
“Who you?”
“I’m just a bum,” Francis said. “But I’m sober and I can get you some soup.”
“Get me a drink?”
“No, I ain’t got money for that.”
“Then soup.”
“You wanna stand up?”
“No. I’ll wait here.”
“You’re gettin’ all dusty.”
“That’s good.”
“Whatever you say,” Francis said, standing up. “But watch out for them dogs.”
She whimpered as Rudy and Francis left the lot. The night sky was black as a bat and the wind was bringing ice to the world. Francis admitted the futility of preaching to Sandra. Who could preach to Francis in the weeds? But that don’t make it right that she can’t go inside to get warm. Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold.
“Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold,” he said to Rudy.
“Right,” said Rudy. “Who said that?”
“I said that, you ape.”
“I ain’t no ape.”
“Well you look like one.”
From the mission came sounds made by an amateur organist of fervent aggression, and of several voices raised in praise of good old Jesus. where’d we all be without him? The voices belonged to the Reverend Chester, and to half a dozen men in shirt sleeves who sat in the front rows of the chapel area’s folding chairs. Reverend Chester, a gargantuan man with a clubfoot, wild white hair, and a face flushed permanently years ago by a whiskey condition all his own, stood behind the lectern looking out at maybe forty men and one woman.
Helen.
Francis saw her as he entered, saw her gray beret pulled off to the left, recognized her old black coat. She held no hymnal as the others did, but sat with arms folded in defiant resistance to the possibility of redemption by any Methodist like Chester; for Helen was a Catholic. And any redemption that came her way had better be through her church, the true church, the only church.
“Jesus,” the preacher and his shirt-sleeved loyalists sang, “the name that charms our fears, That bids our sorrows cease, ‘Tis music in the sinners’ ears, ‘Tis life and health and peace…”