“He sure as hell does,” said Whitey No. 2.
“I ain’t going to stand for no excuses,” said Hazel.
Mack studied the problem from every angle. “Hazel’s right,” he said at last. “We’ve been selfish. We never in our lives had such a good friend as Doc, and we’re letting him down. Makes me feel ashamed. It’s Hazel showed the way. If I was in trouble I wouldn’t want Hazel to do no figuring but I sure would like to have him for a friend.”
Hazel ducked his head in embarrassment. In his life so few compliments had come his way that he didn’t know how to cope with them.
Mack went on, “I make a solemn move we all stand up and drink a toast to Hazel—a noble, noble soul!”
“Aw, hell, fellas,” said Hazel, and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
They stood in a circle around him, Mack and Eddie, Whitey No. 1 and Whitey No. 2, and each one tipped the jug over his elbow and drank to Hazel. Good feeling was running so high they did it again, and were about to do it a third time when Hazel said, “Ain’t there something we can drink to so I can get a drink?”
“To Lefty Grove!”[57] said Eddie.
That broke the ice. An era of good feeling set in. They dug up another keg of the private stock Eddie had saved during the war. He started the bung and smelled it delicately.
“I remember this one,” he said. “They was some guys up from South America and they brought in a bottle of absinthe.”[58]
“Perfumes the whole house,” said Mack.
It was like old times, they reminded one another. If Gay were only here—let’s drink a toast to good old Gay, our departed friend.
The absinthe had soothed the mixture in the keg and added something sweet and old-fashioned. A courtliness crept into the speech of the dwellers of the Palace Flop house, an old-world courtesy. Everyone vied to be last, not first, at the refilled jug.
“Next dough we get we’ll go up to Woolworth’s[59] and get some glasses,” said Mack.
“Hell,” said Whitey No. 2, “they’ll just get broke. But I see what you mean.”
Somehow they felt they were living in a moment when history pauses and takes stock and changes course. They knew they would look back on this night as a beginning. At such times men feel the nudge toward oratory.
Mack steadied himself against the stove and begged their attention by rapping on the stovepipe. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us here highly resolve to get Doc’s ass out of the sling of despond.”
Eddie said, “Remember we done something like that once and damn near ruined him.”
Mack’s golden mood held. “We were younger then,” he said. “This time we’re going to think her out and she’s going to be foolproof.”
Hazel was so far won back into comradeship that he had relaxed into happy incoherence. “To Lefty Grove!” he said.
Mack opened the oven door and sat on it. “I’ve give it a lot of thought,” he said. “Lately I done hardly nothing else.”
“You never do hardly nothing else,” said Whitey No. 2.
Mack ignored him. “I got a theory—”
“Aw, shut up!” said Eddie.
“Who you talking to?” said Whitey No. 2.
“I don’t know,” said Eddie innocently, “but if the shoe fits—”
“I got a theory, if you ain’t too pie-eyed to listen,” said Mack. When he had them quiet he went on, “When you hear my theory you might get kind of violent. I want you to sleep on it before you talk. I think Doc needs a wife.”
“What!”
“Well, hell, he don’t have to marry her,” said Mack. “You know what I mean…” If the absinthe had not given them tolerance he might have had a series of fights right then. “Kindly do not interrupt,” he said. “I will now review the dame situation in the U.S. You take a look at divorces and the reasons for them and you can only think one thing: the only guy that shouldn’t have nothing to do with picking out a wife is the guy that’s going to marry her. That’s a fact. It’s a fact that if he’s left alone a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.”
“Play it safe and don’t marry nobody,” said Whitey No. 2.
“There’s some guys can’t operate that way,” said Mack.
“Are you suggesting we turn Doc, our true friend, in?”
“I asked you not to shoot off your face until you slept on it,” said Mack with dignity.
Hazel tugged at his sleeve. “Ain’t you joking, Mack?”
“No,” said Mack, “I ain’t joking.”
“If anything bad come to Doc, you know what I’d do to you?” Hazel asked.
“Yes,” said Mack. “I think I do—and I think I’d have it coming.”
Hazel’s bed was a four-poster on which the bedposts were two-by-fours topped by a quilt. He had built it from memory of a moving picture. When the Palace Flop house was quiet at last, Hazel lay in his bed and looked up at the log-cabin pattern of his canopy. His mind was whirling. He wished there were some simpler way to help Doc than by the major operation Mack had suggested. Once he got up and looked out the door and saw that the green shaded light was on in the laboratory.
“The poor bastard,” he whispered.
He didn’t sleep well and his dreams were shaped like mushrooms.
12
Flower in a Crannied Wall[60]
Joe Elegant[61] was a pale young man with bangs. He smoked foreign cigarettes in a long ebony holder and he cooked for the Bear Flag. The girls said he made the best popovers in the world, and he could give a massage that would shake the kinks out of a Saturday night when the fleet was in. He sneered most of the time, and except at mealtime kept to himself in his little lean-to behind the Bear Flag, from which the rattle of his typewriter could be heard late at night.
One morning soon after she had come Suzy was having her coffee while Joe Elegant cleared the table of crumbs from earlier breakfasts.
“You make good coffee,” Suzy said.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t look like a guy who would work here.”
“It’s temporary, I assure you.”
“I got a wonderful recipe for gumbo. Want me to give it to you?”
“Fauna designs the meals.”
“You ain’t very friendly.”
“Why should I be?”
He was passing behind her. Suzy reached up, hooked her fingers in his shirt collar, twisted and yanked his face down level with her own. “Listen you,” she began, and she scowled into his popping eyes. “Oh, the hell with it,” said Suzy and released him.
Joe Elegant stepped back and massaged his throat and smoothed his shirt.
“Sorry,” said Suzy.
“It’s quite all right.”
“What makes you so mean?”
“You said it. I don’t belong here.”
“Where do you belong?”
“I don’t think you’d understand.”
“You too good for the place?”
“Let’s say I’m different.”
“No kidding!” said Suzy.
“I’m writing a novel.”
“You are? What about? I love novels.”
“You wouldn’t like this one.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t understand it.”
“Then what good is it?”
“It isn’t intended for the mass.”
“I’m the mass, huh? I guess you got something there. I bet you could write a pretty nice hunk of stuff.”
Joe Elegant swallowed and his face twitched convulsively. “Sometime I’ll read you some of it.”
“Say, that would be nice. But you said I couldn’t understand it.”
“I’ll explain it as I go along.”
“I’d like that. There’s one whole hell of a lot I don’t understand.”
57
Lefty Grove: Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove, one of the greatest pitchers in major-league baseball history. Grove (1900–75) retired in 1941 with a career record of 300-141. His .680 lifetime winning percentage is eighth all-time, but none of the seven men ahead of him won more than 236 games. Grove was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947. In 1999, he was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
58
absinthe: A distilled, highly alcoholic, anise-flavored spirit derived from herbs including the flowers and leaves of the medicinal plant wormwood
59
Woolworth’s: The F. W. Woolworth Company was a nationwide retail corporation whose five-and-dime stores became a nearly universal presence in America. The first Woolworth’s store was founded in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth; the chain closed in 1997.
60
Flower in a Crannied Walclass="underline" “Flower in the Crannied Wall” (1869), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), a popular English Victorian poet and the poet laureate of En gland from 1850 to 1892: “Flower in the crannied wall, / I pluck you out of the crannies, / I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, / Little flower—but
61
Joe Elegant: Various candidates have been proposed as the model for Joe Elegant—notably mythologist Joseph Campbell and novelist Truman Capote—though, given the self-parodying nature of