These reminiscences by Francis evoked from Rowdy Dick an envy that surpassed reason. Why should any man be so gifted not only with so much pleasurable history but also with a gift of gab that could mesmerize a quintet of bums around a fire under a bridge? Why were there no words that would unlock what lay festering in the heart of Rowdy Dick Doolan, who needed so desperately to express what he could never even know needed expression?
Well, the grand question went unanswered, and the magic words went undiscovered. For Rowdy Dick took vengeful focus on the shoes of the voluble Francis, which were both the most desirable and, except for the burning sticks and boards in the fire, the most visible objects under that Chicago bridge. And Rowdy Dick reached inside his shirt, where he kept the small meat cleaver he had carried ever since Colorado, and slid it out of its carrying case, which he had fashioned from cardboard, oilcloth, and string; and he told Francis then: I’m gonna cut your goddamn feet off; explaining this at first and instant lunge, but explaining, even then, rather too soon for achievement, for the reflexes of Francis were not so rubbery then as they might be now in Jack’s bathroom. They were full of fiber and acid and cannonade; and before Rowdy Dick, who had drunk too much of the homemade hooch he had bought, unquestionably too cheaply for sanity, earlier in the day, could make restitution for his impetuosity, Francis deflected the cleaver, which was aimed no longer at his feet but at his head, losing in the process two thirds of a right index finger and an estimated one eighth of an inch of flesh from the approximate center of his nose. He bled then in a wild careen, and with diminished hand knocking the cleaver from Rowdy Dick’s grip, he took hold of that same Rowdy Dick by pantleg and armpit and swung him, oh wrathful lambs, against the abutment where the poem was inscribed, swung him as a battering ram might be swung, and cracked Rowdy Dick’s skull from left parietal to the squamous area of the occipital. rendering him bloody, insensible, leaking, and instantly dead.
What Francis recalled of this unmanageable situation was the compulsion to flight, the most familiar notion, after the desire not to aspire, that he had ever entertained. And after searching, as swiftly as he knew how, for his lost digital joints, and after concluding that they had flown too deeply into the dust and the weeds ever to be retrieved again by any hand of any man, and after pausing also, ever so briefly, for a reconnoitering, not of what might be recoverable of the nose but of what might be visually memorable because of its separation into parts, Francis began to run, and in so doing, reconstituted a condition that was as pleasurable to his being as it was naturaclass="underline" the running of bases after the crack of the bat, the running from accusation, the running from the calumny of men and women, the running from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit through ritualistic straightenings, the running, finally, in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit.
He found his way to a freight yard, found there an empty boxcar with open door, and so entered into yet another departure from completion: the true and total story of his life thus far. It was South Bend before he got to a hospital, where the intern asked him: Where’s the finger? And Francis said: In the weeds. And how about the nose? Where’s that piece of the nose? If you’d only brought me that piece of the nose, we might be able to put it back together and you wouldn’t even know it was gone.
All things had ceased to bleed by then, and so Francis was free once again from those deadly forces that so frequently sought to sever the line of his life.
He had stanched the flow of his wound.
He had stood staunchly irresolute in the face of capricious and adverse fate.
He had, oh wondrous man, stanched death its very self.
o o o
Francis dried his face with the towel, buttoned up his shirt, and put on his coat and trousers. He noddçd an apology to Rowdy Dick for having taken his life and included in the nod the hope that Dick would understand it hadn’t been intentional. Rowdy Dick smiled and doffed his cap, creating an eruption of brilliance around his dome. Francis could see the line of Dick’s cranial fracture running through his hair like a gleaming river, and Francis understood that Rowdy Dick was in heaven, or so close to it that he was taking on the properties of an angel of the Lord. Dick put his cap on again and even the cap exuded a glow, like the sun striving to break through a pale, gray cloud. “Yes,” said Francis, “I’m sorry I broke your head so bad, but I hope you remember I had my reasons,” and he held up to Rowdy Dick his truncated finger. “You know, you can’t be a priest when you got a finger missin’. Can’t say mass with a hand like this. Can’t throw a baseball either.” He rubbed the bump in his nose with the stump of a finger. “Kind of a bump there, but what the hell. Doe put a big bandage on it, and it got itchy, so I ripped it off. Went back when it got infected, and the doe says, You shouldn’ta took off that bandage, because now I got to scrape it out and you’ll have an even bigger bump there. I’da had a bump anyway. What the hell, little bump like that don’t look too bad, does it? I ain’t complainin’. I don’t hold no grudges more’n five years.”
“You all right in there, Francis?” Helen called. “Who are you talking to?”
Francis waved to Rowdy Dick, understanding that some debts of violence had been settled, but he remained full of the awareness of rampant martyrdom surrounding him: martyrs to wrath, to booze, to failure, to loss, to hostile weather. Aldo Campione gestured at Francis, suggesting that while there may be some inconsistency about it, prayers were occasionally answerable, a revelation that did very little to improve Francis’s state of mind, for there had never been a time since childhood when he knew what to pray for.
“Hey bum,” he said to Jack when he stepped out of the bathroom, “how about a bum gettin’ a drink?”
“He ain’t no bum,” Clara said.
“Goddamn it, I know he ain’t,” Francis said. “He’s a hell of a man. A workin’ man.”
“How come you shaved?” Helen asked.
“Gettin’ itchy. Four days and them whiskers grow back inside again.”
“It sure improves how you look,” Clara said.
“That’s the truth,” said Jack.
“I knew Francis was handsome,” Clara said, “but this is the first time I ever saw you clean shaved.”
“I was thinkin’ about how many old bums I know died in the weeds. Wake up covered with snow and some of ‘em layin’ there dead as hell, froze stiff. Some get up and walk away from it. I did myself. But them others are gone for good. You ever know a guy named Rowdy Dick Doolan in your travels?”
“Never did,” Jack said.
“There was another guy, Pocono Pete, he died in Denver, froze like a brick. And Poocher Felton, he bought it in Detroit, pissed his pants and froze tight to the sidewalk. And a crazy bird they called Ward Six, no other name. They found him with a red icicle growin’ out of his nose. All them old guys, never had nothin’, never knew nothin’, stupid, thievin’, crazy. Foxy Phil Tooker, a skinny little runt, he froze all scrunched up, knees under his chin. ‘Stead of straightenin’ him out, they buried him in half a coffin. Lorda mercy, them geezers. I bet they all of ‘em, dyin’ like that, I bet they all wind up in heaven, if they ever got such a place.”
“I believe when you’re dead you go in the ground and that’s the end of it,” Jack said. “Heaven never made no sensicality to me whatsoever.”
“You wouldn’t get in anyhow,” Helen said. “They’ve got your reservations someplace else.”
“Then I’m with him,” Clara said. “Who’d want to be in heaven with all them nuns? God what a bore.”
Francis knew Clara less than three weeks, but he could see the curve of her life: sexy kid likes the rewards, goes pro, gets restless, marries and makes kids, chucks that, pro again, sickens, but really sick, gettin’ old, gettin’ ugly, locks onto Jack, turns monster. But she’s got most of her teeth, not bad; and that hair: you get her to a beauty shop and give her a marcel, it’d be all right; put her in new duds, high heels and silk stockin’s; and hey, look at them titties, and that leg: the skin’s clear on it.