Schools exhale the young. Not yet convinced they care to take on the hard work of the world, most of them gather and disperse around pool tables and pinball machines, in drugstores and down at the bus station, or simply on corners. Basketball games are got up in schoolyards and back alleys. The members of the high school varsity work out briefly in the gym, then go home to rest up for tonight’s game. Superboys wing cold-fingered through trees in the cause of justice while, below, slingshot wars are waged. Little girls play house or give injections to ailing dolls, while their older sisters pop gum, slam doors, gossip, suck at milkshakes, or merely sit in wonder at the odd age upon them. Gangs of youngsters fall upon the luckless eccentrics, those with big ears or short pants or restless egos, and sullen hates are nursed. Rebellious cigarette butts are lit, lipped, flicked, ground under heel.
Out at Deepwater No. 9 Coalmine, the day shift rise up out of the workings by the cagefuls, jostle like tough but tired ballplayers into the showers. Some will go to homes, some to hunt or talk about it, some to fill taverns, some to card tables; many will go to the night’s ball game against Tucker City. In town, the night shift severally eat, dress, bitch, wisecrack, wait for cars or warm up their own. A certain apprehension pesters them, but it’s a nightly commonplace. Some joke to cover it, others complain sourly about wages or the contents of their lunchbuckets.
On Main Street, shops close and soon highballs will be poured at kitchen sinks, cards dealt at the Elks or the Country Club. Business is in its usual post-Christmas slump. Inventories are underway. Taxes must be figured. Dull stuff. Time gets on, seems to run and drag at the same time. People put their minds on supper and the ball game, and talk, talk about anything, talk and listen to talk. Religion, sex, politics, toothpastes, food, movie stars and prizefighters. Fishing, horoscopes, women’s clothes, automobiles, human nature. Circles and squares, whores, virgins, wives, daughters, time and money. Boredom and good times. Putting on weight, going steady, cancer, evolution, parents, the good old days, Jesus, baseball trades. Sadists, saints, and eating places. Tick talk tick talk. Smoking cures. The job, better jobs, how dumb the kids are, television, coalmining, the hit parade. Indigestion cures. Jews, Arabs, Communists, Negroes, colleges. Impotence cures. The Holy Spirit. The state tournament, filters, West Condon, West Condoners — mostly that: West Condoners, what’s wrong with them, what dumb things they’ve done, what they’ve been talking about, what’s wrong with the way they talk, who’s putting out, jokes they’ve told, why they’re not happy, what’s wrong with their homelife.
Some of the talk, though not the best of it, gets into the town newspaper, the West Condon Chronicle, which now young carriers fold and pack militantly into canvas bags, soon to fan out over the community on bikes on their nightly delivery of the word, dreaming as they throw that they are aces of the Cardinal staff. Up front, publisher and editor Justin Miller, himself an ex-carrier, cradles the telephone, pivots wearily in his swivel chair, stares out the window, unwashed in fourteen years, on the leaden parking lot. It is scabby with dead weeds, gray ice patches. On the other side of the lot: colorless hind-side of the West Condon Hotel. His assistant, Lou Jones, hammers out copy for tomorrow at the other desk. He’d ask Jones to cover tonight’s basketball game, but he knows Jones resents assignments that have anything to do with adolescents. Doris the waitress emerges from the rear door of the hotel coffeshop with slops, empties them into the incinerator, pauses there a moment to pick her nose. Miller wonders why Fisher, the old guy who runs the hotel, manages to find only these blighted moldering dogs to work for him.
Behind the window of an old gray weatherbowed house in the town’s cheap housing development district, a former buddy and high school basketball teammate of Miller’s, Oxford Clemens, stands staring out. Children in the dirt street outside push their game of kick-the-can into the gathering dark, shrieking full-grown obscenities in shrill glee. Clemens yawns, scratches his crotch, chances to be looking when the streetlight goes on, grins at it. He turns and reaches for a pair of pants heaped up on a chair. There is a large rip in the seat of his jockey shorts; the khaki pants are war surplus, limp and long unlaundered. At 5:12, one hundred thirty-eight minutes before game time, a blowzy postwar Buick dappled with rust rattles up in front of the old place, sounds its deep-throated Model T horn. Oxford Clemens shambles out, buttoning a yellow silk shirt up against the skin, carrying a leather jacket and his bucket. He piles in back with Tub Puller, who is snoring. “Evenin’, ladies,” Clemens greets as he pulls the door to. Pooch Minicucci who is driving says nothing, but Angelo Moroni, Clemens’ faceboss at the mine, turns around and says, “Hey, Ferd, is that the only fucking shirt you got?” Clemens grins faintly, lets it go.
The short drive out to Deepwater No. 9 is dominated by Moroni who talks without cease. The subject matter is getting out of the mine, getting out of West Condon, getting out of this whole useless life, and getting into women. Oxford works his long arms into his leather jacket, accidentally jostling Tub Puller. Puller lashes out irritably with his stubby right arm, slams Clemens in the chest. Puller is an airdox shotfirer by trade, has a body and face the immensity and consistency of an iceboxful of bread dough, says next to nothing all day long. Moroni is a short muscular man with a cocky round face, wideset eyes that turn down smilingly at the corners, short upper lip, broad nose, and twenty-seven years in the mines. He wears a hat on the side of his head and has a habit of tipping it down toward his nose when having a drink or playing pinochle with his buddy Vince Bonali, or talking to women. Minicucci is thin, with a ridged Roman nose. He has a speech defect so that he cannot pronounce his “r’s” and in the mine he is a triprider. Clemens is a timberman, tall with tousled yellow hair and narrow bloodshot eyes. At this moment he is coughing, a smoker’s airy wheeze, doubled forward. “You cocksucker, Puller!” he rasps gamely through his teeth, leaning back. Puller unceremoniously whacks him again, squinting all the while out the window into the night, clearly disgusted to be awake. That’s what a man gets who’s born to be Ferd the Turd. Clemens lights a smoke. He’s used to it, but that doesn’t cheer him.
“They ain’t no place to pouk,” Minicucci complains, arriving at the mine.
“Go on up under the watertower,” Moroni says.
“Gee, Ange, it’s agin the wules. I don’t—”
“Fuck the ‘wules,’ Pooch! You go park there and anybody asks, you tell them Ange said for you to, hear?”
It is 5:28. There is only one light burning in the front office building, more lights on toward the portal. The tipple is barely visible against the starless sky. The watertower, silver-bellied above them, is of course not obscured at all.
In the washhouse, Clemens removes his leather jacket, his yellow silk shirt, his loafers, and his khaki pants. He bends over, exposing the rip in his shorts, and a broad-chested man, dark with yet darker heavy eyebrows, smiles, takes aim, cracks his butt with a wet towel. Clemens yelps, spins and throws himself savagely on the man with the towel. Angelo Moroni and Tuck Filbert pull them apart. “You fatass catlicker wop, Bonali! I done licked you wunst, I’ll lick you agin!” Clemens’ thin face is awry with his fury.
“Lick this, crybaby,” says Vince Bonali, clutching his genitals with one thick-wristed fist and thrusting his round belly forward. He is laughing, but without humor.
At the gym, they’ll be turning on the lights. Old Patch the janitor and a couple of the freshmen will be sweeping down the floor. Clemens can feel the polish, taste the hardwood, smell the sheer joy of it. He dresses and thinks about that, tries to forget about Bonali and Moroni and all the rest. He pulls on his stained bluish jacket, frayed at the cuffs, shoves heavy gloves into the pockets, picks up his bucket. For all his effort, tension still presses at his eyes and holds his jaws clamped. Bonali is dressed but is still horsing around, has just blistered the thin ass of a tall bony miner named Giovanni Bruno with his towel. Bruno says nothing, barely flinches, simply turns pale and stares coldly at Bonali. Several laugh. “Hit him agin!” cries Chester Johnson. “I think he likes it!” More laughter. Bruno’s buddy and sole protector, Preacher Collins, has already gone below and Bruno is left alone.