“Do you like brownies?” he asked.
“I love them.”
“I’ll make you some. Maybe you’ll come to my apartment some afternoon. I could give you a cup of tea.”
“Say, you’re a nice fella! Got any more coffee?”
“I’ll make a fresh pot.”
13
Parallels Must Be Related
Doc spent a restless night. His head was full of yellow pads and seers and octopi. Ordinarily he would have worked or read since he couldn’t sleep, but now if he turned on a light he would see the yellow pad and the marshaled pencils.
As the dawn crept over the bay he decided to go for a very long walk, perhaps to follow the shoreline all the way around to Carmel. He arose, and since it was still dusky in the laboratory he turned on the lights to make his coffee.
Wide Ida, from the entrance of La Ida, saw his lights come on. She put an unlabeled pint bottle of brown liquor in a paper bag and crossed the street to Western Biological.
“Doc,” she said, “would you work this stuff over?”
“What is it?”
“They say it’s whisky. I just want to know if it’ll kill anybody. I got a pretty good buy. They make it up in Pine Canyon.”
“That’s against the law,” said Doc.
“Killing people is against the law too,” said Wide Ida.
Doc was torn between bootlegging and murder. He thought sadly that he was always involved in something like this—not good or bad but bad and less bad. He made a fairly quick analysis. “It’s not poison,” he said, “but it won’t build good healthy stomachs. There’s some fusel oil[62] in it. But I guess it’s no worse than Old Tennis Shoes.”
“Thanks, Doc. What do I owe you?”
“Oh, maybe a quart—but not this stuff.”
“I’ll send over some Old Taylor.”
“You don’t have to go off the deep end,” said Doc.
“Doc, I hear you got trouble.”
“Me? What kind of trouble?”
“I just heard,” said Wide Ida.
Doc said angrily, “I’ve got no trouble. What’s all the talk! God Almighty, everybody treats me as though I had a disease. What kind of trouble?”
“If there’s anything I can do,” she said and went out quickly, leaving the pint behind.
Doc took a sip of it, made a face, and took a swig. His heart was pounding angrily. He could not admit that the pity of his friends only confirmed his frustration. He knew that pity and contempt are brothers. He set his chin. “I will get the spring tides at La Jolla,” he said to himself. “I will get a new microscope.” And the very lowest voice whispered, “Somewhere there’s warmth.”
He sat down at his desk and wrote viciously: “Parallels must be related.” He took another drink from the pint and opened yesterday’s mail. There was an order for six sets of slides—starfish, embryonic series, for the Oakland Polytechnic[63] High School. He was almost glad to do the old and practiced work. He got his collecting buckets together, threw rubber boots in his old car, and drove out to the Great Tide Pool.
14
Lousy Wednesday
Some days are born ugly. From the very first light they are no damn good what ever the weather, and everybody knows it. No one knows what causes this, but on such a day people resist getting out of bed and set their heels against the day. When they are finally forced out by hunger or job they find that the day is just as lousy as they knew it would be.
On such a day it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee, shoestrings break, cups leap from the shelf by themselves and shatter on the floor, children ordinarily honest tell lies, and children ordinarily good unscrew the tap handles of the gas range and lose the screws and have to be spanked. This is the day the cat chooses to have kittens and house broken dogs wet on the parlor rug.
Oh, it’s awful on such a day! The postman brings overdue bills. If it’s a sunny day it is too damn sunny, and if it is dark who can stand it?
Mack knew it was going to be that kind of a day. He couldn’t find his pants. He fell over a box that had crept out in his path. He cursed each brother in the Palace Flop house, and on his way across the vacant lot he went out of his way to kick a dandelion flower. He was sitting gloomily on a pipe when Eddie came by, and so naturally he walked with Eddie to Wide Ida’s to try to do something about it. He hung around waiting for Wide Ida to go so that Eddie could slip him a drink. But Wide Ida was bending over the bar, cursing a letter.
“Taxes,” she said. “Every time you get going there’s more taxes. You’re lucky, Mack. You don’t own nothing and you don’t make nothing. Until they start taxing skin, you’re safe.”
“What’s the beef?” he asked.
“City and county taxes,” said Wide Ida.
“On what?”
“On this place. It ain’t much, but I was fixed to put a down payment on a new Pontiac.”
It was a statement that ordinarily would have aroused a detached compassion in Mack, together with mild self-congratulation that he was not burdened with taxable assets. But now a nagging worry fell on him, and he went back to the Palace Flop house to worry in greater comfort. He went over the history of the Palace in his mind.
It had belonged to Lee Chong. Long before the war Mack and the boys had rented it from him for five dollars a month, and, naturally enough, they had never paid any rent. Lee Chong would have been shocked if they had. Then Lee Chong sold out to Joseph and Mary. Did the Palace go with the rest? Mack didn’t know, but if it did, the Patrón didn’t know it. He was no Lee Chong. He would have demanded the rent. But if the Patrón did own the place, he would get a tax bill. If he got a tax bill, he was sure to be on the necks of Mack and the boys. The Patrón was not a man to pay out money without getting more money back, that was certain.
It seemed very unjust. Their home, their security, even their social standing, were cast in the balance. Mack lay on his bed and considered what could be done. Suppose the Patrón demanded back rent—clear back for years. You couldn’t trust a man like that. What a lousy day it was! Mack didn’t know what to do, so he called a meeting of the boys, even sent Hazel to bring Eddie back from Wide Ida’s bar.
It was a grim and shaken assembly. Mack explained all the angles until even Hazel seemed to understand the danger. The boys studied their fingers, looked at the ceiling, blew on their knuckles. Eddie got up and walked around his chair to change his thinking luck.
At last Whitey No. 2 said, “We could steal his mail so he won’t get no tax bill.”
“It ain’t practical,” said Mack. “Even if it wasn’t a crime.”
Hazel offered, “We could kill him.”
“You ain’t heard that’s against the law too?” Mack asked.
“I mean, make it like an accident,” said Hazel. “He could fall off Point Lobos.”
“Then somebody else inherits the joint and we don’t even know who.”
The injustice in the theory of private ownership of real estate was descending on them.
“Maybe we could get Doc to talk to him. He likes Doc.” This was Whitey No. 1’s offering.
“That would only draw it to his attention,” said Mack. “Hell, he might even raise the rent.”
“He might even try to collect it,” said Eddie.
Hazel was going into a slow but luminous burn. He gazed about the whitewashed walls of the Palace Flop house, at the Coca-Cola calendar girls,[64] at the great and ancient woodstove, at the grandfather clock, at the framed portrait of Romie Jacks.[65] There were honest, unabashed tears in Hazel’s eyes. “The son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “After all our work he takes away our home—the only place where I ever been happy. How can a guy be so goddam mean?”
62
fusel oiclass="underline" An oily, colorless liquid with a disagreeable odor and taste. It is a mixture of alcohols and fatty acids, formed during the alcoholic fermentation of organic materials. Fusel oil is used as a solvent in the manufacture of certain lacquers and enamels (it dissolves nitrocellulose). It is poisonous to humans.
63
Oakland Polytech: Oakland Technical High School, in Oakland, California, known locally as Oakland Tech, is a public high school located on 4351 Broadway in North Oakland. It is one of six comprehensive public high school campuses in Oakland. Founded in 1917, it is the alma mater of Clint Eastwood, Rickey Henderson, Huey P. Newton, and the Pointer Sisters.
64
Coca-Cola calendar girls: Illustrators for the Atlanta-based soft drink giant pioneered a type of graphically appealing and colorful calendar art that featured Coca-Cola’s Calendar Girls, who, though provocatively posed in bathing suits, were intended to portray wholesomeness as well as beauty. Steinbeck had used the ubiquitous advertising image in chapter one of
65
Romie Jacks: Romie Jack was one of the seven surviving children (out of nine) of wealthy and controversial Scottish-born Monterey County land baron David Jack and his wife, Maria Christina Soledad Romie. Romie served as manager of the family’s David Jack Corporation–owned Abbot Hotel (later Cominos Hotel) in Salinas. The Cominos Hotel is featured in Steinbeck’s short story “The Chrysanthemums.”