Beat it. He headed east, through Monday’s early-morning darkness, legs driving, clicking heels in the deserted street in a rush to leave. Got away! Scot-free. Scut free, too, he got. Scut free, scot-free. He-e-e-ya! If that was Jonas? Nah, some other little shrimp.
III
Hurrying, he crowed his wordless exultation aloud, his cock-crow aloud, and headed east, straight toward Park Avenue. He was the luckiest guy alive, luckiest punk alive, luckiest prick alive, luckiest bastard alive, alive-o. Before him, he could see a fire burning under the great gray viaduct of the New York Central Railway on Park Avenue, a fire in a big steel drum. Just as a Pullman with dim windows rumbled by overhead on wheels muffled by the solid trestle, the flames on the ground below spewed upward. Dreaming in the Pullman, they never dreamed a fire was burning in a drum in the pushcart district beneath them, never knew they were rolling over a Jewish pushcart district, never knew he, Ira Stigman, had paused beside the open phone booth at Gabe’s Wholesale Produce on the corner to watch them roll by in the night, never knew him, never knew his wild escapade, his frenzied escape, those up there, sleeping peacefully in trains named Lake George, Fort Collins, and Atlanta. He felt like tarrying a minute with the thought, tarrying to recover norm. The flames lit up the underside of the trestle to lurid parasol of yellow and scarlet, and lit up the cross-braced pillars too, fitfully, so that they almost seemed in motion, legs of a huge, ambling myriapod. It felt so good leaning against the phone booth, just leaning, subsiding, surceasing. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. Was that from Lear? No, Macbeth. Only he wasn’t sleeping, just enjoying escape, blissful fugitive. Boy, that was good. Better than with Minnie that time. Nice and plump and fresh and humid. Beautiful, beautiful back-scuttle. Celestial back-scuttle. Boy, you could get another hard-on thinking about it. If he ever let himself pull off, that was what he would think about. How could anything be so wonderful and so vile, so rotten, so dirty, and so heavenly? Jumpin’ Jesus. Figure it out. Oh, easy: it was you.
Near the drum a large truck was parked, and the blaze from the drum played on a sturdy young fellow on the tailgate who shoveled refuse swept into a heap on the floor of the truck to fuel the blaze: broken slats of vegetable crates, fruit wrappers, packaging material, trash. Each shovelful damped the flames momentarily, flames that leaped up again, hurling light as far as the granite wall at 111th Street, where the massive ramp began. Firelight lapped the stoops of tenements and skimmed along the store windows of the closed, scruffy little shops at the base of the tenements that flanked the pushcart district that found shelter beneath the trestle. . where Mom shopped Sunday mornings — Ira’s lip curled — in the good old days.
Brief spell of respite, damaged respite, like everything else in his life. Then passage again: Ira on the sidewalk exchanged cursory inspection with the young fellow on the truck, felt the moment set in his mind as if it were some kind of a cerebral casting. Passing on, he glanced inside the wide-open sliding doors of Gabe’s: two men were in there, a hulking one with a metal-clad clipboard, and a stumpy one with a push broom. On one side of them in the weak light, stacks of crated produce lined the wall; on the other, from sliding door to back wall a crowd of tarpaulin-covered pushcarts were jammed in for the night.
Scrape of shovel, crackle of fire, smell of smoke wafted on the crisp night air, greeted the senses, and the tableau inside Gabe’s place added a hint of citron: grapefruit, lemons, oranges, ah. As though exorcising the last of inner turmoil. Ah, dispelling vestige of heinous furor — and terror, guilt — the young guy on the tailgate of the truck dumped all the rubbish into the steel drum — and the rubbish turned into flame writhing upward, flame glorifying the squalor that surrounded the place.
“Take it easy, Giorgio.” Snapping down the cover of his metal-clad invoice clip, the hulking and deceptively soft-looking man with slightly rolling gait came out of the wide-open sliding doors, followed by the other, the squat, grizzled, Italian-appearing keeper of the place — or night watchman: he glanced at Ira.
“Me? Take it easy? When you git as old as me, it’s too late to take it easy.”
“Too late? That’s when I thought it was just right.” The other clamped the clipboard under his arm, brought out a package of cigarettes.
“T’anks. Maybe fer some, but not fer me.”
A match flared. The old watchman’s grizzled face leaned into the matchlight, craggy and worn. “T’anks,” puffing his cigarette, his visage lost its features. “Dat’s a Camel, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.” The other lit up his cigarette. “You can get in a snooze on the job every once in a while, can’tcha?”
“Me? No. Days only is when I can sleep. But not nights, not even when I’m off. Nights, I don’t know what the hell it is: bundles keep bustin’ open in my head.”
“Yeah?” The man with the metal clipboard laughed. “Damaged goods, hah? No Joisey tomaters, here.” He uttered a fat, genial laugh.
“Nah,” the old watchman growled rejection. “Not fer me. When I lost my Gina, I lost it all.”
“I was just kiddin’, Giorgio. You know how it is.”
Was he dreaming, somnambulating? No, he wasn’t dreaming, somnambulating. Here came a guy, wiry, thin as a rail, in crumpled hat, maybe porkpie shape once, in the sere, weathered garb of the tramp, but disheveled, hurrying toward them. Shaken out of his momentary trance, streetwise, Ira sidestepped to the curb, noted the newcomer’s bony face to the firelight: his jaws were spattered with blood, his nostrils raw, his nose askew. Jesus, what a pasting someone had given him: a drunk. Rubbing his lips, oblivious of everyone, the other plunged into the open phone booth outside Gabe’s. The light clicked on. No, it was real enough: that savage pummeling racket coming from the half-closed booth was real enough. So was the violent shadow thrown on the sidewalk by the feeble dome light of the booth: the figure of a man banging, hammering the coin box.
“Dat’s right, beat the shit out of it,” the night watchman encouraged. “Wake up de neighborhood. Waddaye, crazy?”
Fresh onset of banging the coin box was the answer.
“Hey, you hear dat rummy, Guido?” the truck driver called to the young fellow on the tailgate of the truck. “He’s like a pimp beatin’ on his whore, ain’t he? Listen to him.”
The young fellow leaned sideways on his shovel to get a better view. “Tickle it, dat’s right. He’s got his finger up her. Hey, bowl it, why don’tcha?” His youthful laugh rang out under the brooding trestle.
A few more bangs, demented, obdurate pounding against the silence, terminated by the old watchman’s threat: “You don’t git the fuck outta here, I’ll take a hunk o’ pipe t’ye, ye fuckin’ bum!”