“After what I did for you, I know you’ll sign it back to me. Parton Peavey, Smith, Snooky, no problem, they all did. You can see that I and the band, we needs the bread. Verily.”
Edgar, first raised, now bumped the wretched bum’s pavement.
“How much was it?”
“Near sixty thousand apiece. A hundred, near, for our legend Peavey. Isn’t that great? I brought the pen. You know what I did for you?”
Edgar signed three lines as Lambert held out the stock transfer.
“The band goes on. I can afford a casket.” Lambert winked. “Good young people making the band go on. Woodrow takes it when I’m planted. Your funds, Big Thunder Hounds Foundation, huh? Not even really for me, get it? Look at me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I saw that house where you live yesterday. Not gone with the wind, ho? The wind has come back and put you in a castle. Edgar, Edgar, I’m hating this, but could you spare me a little? A couple thou. What I did for you when you were a baby, remember. Times are rough. You can see. I’d never have seen you, chicken and peas La Grange, man—”
“I don’t have any money.”
“House-poor, huh? But a little scratch — the things I did for you — you cost me, the bus. .”
Edgar moved away. Lambert was in a fit of his own virtue. Stooped and angry, Edgar caught Emma’s arm and they ran to where his aunt was waiting in the foyer, caught in the act of giving the snoot to a couple of leather punkers who’d come to (Edgar wished) spit at Lambert’s Wall Street Crash music.
“What’s this rushing?” his aunt wanted to know. They were in the car before Emma told her.
“Edgar has just lost a great deal of money he didn’t know he had.”
Emma’s work with the deaf must have given her some kind of ears, Edgar grieved.
“Oh, yes. The music’s wonderful for a while. But your musicians are notorious bankrupts,” said his aunt.
“They’re just ‘bubbles,’ aren’t they?” He smashed at her.
“Exactly what I said. My generation always knew that.”
By Christmas break, things had changed only for Emma. She had blitzed through her work and was taking the master’s. Her thesis on the deaf was heralded and would be published, with the help of her major professor, her major herald. Edgar didn’t know she was this good. She even got a small advance — one thousand — from publishers in New York, and was hounded instantly for it by her father, from the school of You Owe. All eight of his children owed him for their lifelong hard times. Emma gave him seven hundred.
They remained passionate, but she would not move to Hadley’s house. Edgar was glad. They did make love, though, on the sofa a few times. She opened his horn cases one morning and peered at the freckled and scarred instruments a long time. They seemed to make her angry. Without a word, she left the house and drove away in the Japanese wreck she’d bought.
He was baffled by her sadness, which was turning more into anger nowadays. She would clam up and sometimes beat her fists on whatever was near, including once, his thighs. She had a television and watched the war news through January. She liked to turn up the speech of the generals and said she had a crush on Powell.
The terrible day he went into the trailer, February was ending with a big blow that made the pines whoo and shiver, spooky, warning the homes on wheels beneath them. There had been, during the morning, a burst water main up the road, catching the whole trailer park without water. Emma had been busy cleaning with Lysol, and was outraged by the stoppage. She was in a torrent when he entered, with good news, he thought. Inspired by her, he was well into a book about Chicago bums. He could write again, and what he had was so good that the chairman was trying to get him a large grant to revisit his old haunts. It would be enough to take Emma with him. It was not a bad city at all. Away from the South, she might be happier — holy smoke, why shouldn’t she? She’d never left it. There was her depression, itself.
Edgar sat on the sprung bunk she slept on, petting her. He told her about bums.
For many years, he and female drunks had simply wound up together. He had a place. They just appeared in it, no memory of having got there, isolated by the blazing nimbus of alcohol. The woman might even be sober, some pitying angel on the spoor of a heartbroken man. You could not be awful enough for some women: they were stirred by emaciation, destitution, whiskey whiskers, bus fumes. For other women you could not get foreign enough. Witness Clem, the acned Iranian sot, always with a beauty queen. Some black women were greatly attracted to downed white men. What wild loyalties he’d seen when he’d been sober enough to notice. You had Commies, capital ists (ruined, but adhering), even monarchists, in bumhood. Take away the sickness, he had loved a good deal of the life. He even missed being insane, sometimes. The world matched his dreams some days. Something, a small good thing, almost always turned up. He missed making the nut of drink every day. He missed the raddled adventures. There always was a focus: securing the next high, defending the hoard of liquor money, but with chivalry; getting through the day without murder; being a world citizen, voting and passionate, about the headlines off some fat cat’s newspaper. What about the exploratory raptures of one’s own liquored mind? The drunkard, or bum, was not wasting his mind all the time. He was going deeper in than others: great lore, buzzing insights. The conversation frequently was above the university. Some few bums were renuncios. They had given up the regular world on purpose, and could explain why in long wonderful stories, each one distinct, bravely of no category or school. He’d also met deaf bums, of course. He knew more about them than she’d thought. He knew the blind, too — what stories he could tell about Rasta Paul!
Emma listened closely, having stopped her tears long ago. She seemed avidly sympathetic, her pretty mouth open, her dress falling off her shoulders like a flushed senorita’s, carelessly revealing those breasts that shot warmth through his manhood. Her eyes met his, and it was off with her spectacles and dress, on the bunk in a minute.
Hang in, all good things will come, Edgar remembered. Even his reverie about Sally, the doctor’s wife, lived out long and more on that dirty mattress, a single lightbulb shaking over it. Never had Emma been this carnal. She threw herself into long rituals of defilement, yes. Begged him to take her back there, as never before, and then she was on him with her mouth lest he finish without her tasting it all. She hurled back and forth, then out with her legs, voracious. The panther cry came, rose and fell, rose again. Then she suddenly cast him off, screaming no, no, no, no, no! Immediately she began to cry. She reached and put her spectacles back on, peering first at his naked chest, then at his throat.
“What the hell does that tattoo mean? I never saw that! There’s a war on. Are you for that monster we’re fighting?! Our generals, our airmen — they’re men, and you, you don’t have. . moxie, moxie—that’s it! Your aunt keeps you! Peets Lambert kept you! You ungrateful bitch! You’re gothic, Edgar!”
This was terror. She wouldn’t quit.
“You won’t even play the horns — your natural God-given ticket! No, crowds get to you, weak bitch! Memory gets you! You drag me to your pitiful parents, and I saw the nowhere, the awful never, of you all. But I had to be there to prop you up! Your significant thing, your meditated thing, I’ve screwed, sucked, let you. . You’ve even got gray, waiting, on somebody else’s motorcycle!”
And, before the dish came at him,
“Now your bums, your magical romantic bums. The deaf don’t have a choice, Mister Chicago. And let me tell you something else. After this book, the deaf aren’t going to be my life. I’ve done them, I’m tired. I’m too selfish, if you’ve got to know! It’s my time. I can’t help it. I want healthy people, and rich, traveling people, happy doing kings and princes. But I had to love you. Love you, I know, more than you do me! How could you?”