Doc said, “I intended to work on my paper.”
“Good! I’ll help,” said Old Jingleballicks.
“Oh God! No!” said Doc.
“Man has solved his problems,” Old Jay went on. “Predators he has removed from the earth; heat and cold he has turned aside; communicable disease he has practically eliminated. The old live on, the young do not die. The best wars can’t even balance the birth rate. There was a time when a small army could cut a population in half in a year. Starvation, typhus, plague, tuberculosis, were trusty weapons. A scratch with a spear point meant infection and death. Do you know what the incidence of death from battle wounds is today? One percent. A hundred years ago it was eighty percent. The population grows and the productivity of the earth decreases. In a foreseeable future we shall be smothered by our own numbers. Only birth control could save us, and that is one thing mankind is never going to practice.”
“Brother!” said the Patrón. “What makes you so damn happy about it?”
“It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.”
“I didn’t get one goddam word of that,” said Joseph and Mary.
Doc’s hands were full. In his left he held a small glass of whisky and in his right a can of beer. He sipped from the one and gulped from the other. “Every instinct tells me to stay out of this,” he said, “and every impulse makes me want to get into it.”
“Good!” said Old Jay. “Is that whisky?”
“Old Tennis Shoes,” said Joseph and Mary. “Want some?”
“Perhaps a little later.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a little later now,” said Old Jingleballicks.
“I guess you can hustle with anything,” said the Patrón. “I got a feeling I’m being took.”
“Well, the impulse wins,” said Doc. “You have forgotten one thing, Old Jingleballicks. Indeed, there have been species which became extinct through their own miscalculations, but they were species with a small range of variability. Now consider the lemming—”
“That is a very specialized case,” said Old Jingleballicks.
“How do you know we aren’t? What do lemmings do when their population exceeds the food supply? Whole masses of them swim out to sea and drown, until a balance of food and population is reached.”
“I deny your right to use lemmings,” said Old Jingleballicks. “Hand me the bottle, will you?”
“Deny and be damned!” Doc said. “Is the lemming migration a disease? Is it a memory? Or is it a psychic manifestation forced on part of the group for the survival of the whole?”
Old Jay howled back at him, “I will not be robbed of extinction! This is a swindle.” He turned to the Patrón. “Don’t listen to that man. He’s a charlatan.”
“He sure in hell is,” said Joseph and Mary admiringly.
Doc leveled a finger between the eyes of Old Jay, holding his whisky glass like the butt of a pistol. “Disease, you say? Infection? Down almost to nonexistence? But tell me, are not neurotic disturbances on the increase? And are they curable or does the cure spread them? Now you wait! Don’t you try to talk now. Do you suppose that the tendency toward homosexuality might not also have a mathematical progression? And could this not be the human solution?”
“You can’t prove it,” Old Jingleballicks cried. “It’s all talk—overemphasis. Why, you might as well accuse me of neurotic tendencies and be done with it!” His eyes brimmed with tears. “My friend, my thought-friend, my true friend,” he whimpered.
Doc said, “I wouldn’t even think of such a thing.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Certainly not.”
“When are you going to start dinner?” said Old Jingleballicks.
“You’ve eaten my dinner,” said Doc.
“I’ve got a fine idea,” said Old Jay. “While you start dinner, William and Mary can get a fresh bottle of whisky and I’ll set up the chessmen.”
“It’s not William and Mary, it’s Joseph and Mary.”
“Who is? Oh! My friend, I’m going to teach you the greatest of all games, the ethereal creation of human intelligence. Shall we sugar it up with a little side bet?”
“Why, you dishonest old fraud!” Doc shouted.
“Ten dollars, Mary?”
The Patrón shrugged his shoulders in apology to Doc. “You have to pay to learn things,” he said.
“Make it twenty-five,” Old Jingleballicks said. “You want to live forever?”
Doc opened a can of salmon and a can of spaghetti and stirred the two together in a frying pan. He grated nutmeg over it. Sadly he put the burned stewpot to soak in the sink.
A little after dark the Patrón went back to the grocery and sent Cacahuete to deliver a third bottle of whisky. Upstairs he joined the wetbacks as in advancing and retreating lines they danced the sad and stately measures of the Tehuanos.[95] “Sandunga,”[96] they sang, “Sandunga mama mia…”
In the darkening laboratory Doc and Old Jay went softly into the third bottle of Old Tennis Shoes.
“You’ve had the bed long enough,” Doc said. “I want it now.”
“All right. As I grow older I expect less and less—and get nothing, even from my so-called friends.”
“Look here! You’ve eaten and spoiled my first dinner, stuffed my second, swilled my beer, taken two drinks for one of the whisky, appropriated my bed, broken two phonograph records, and I saw you put my fountain pen in your pocket. And how you razzle-dazzled the Patrón out of twenty-five dollars I don’t know. You shouldn’t have told him that under certain circumstances a knight can jump three squares in one direction—that’s not honest.”
“I know,” said Old Jingleballicks. He patted the pillow lovingly. “Now you lie down here and get comfortable. I’ll bring you a drink. Feel better now?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Doc.
“Say, is that place across the street still running?”
A jagged rage whipped Doc upright. “You stay out of there!” he said. “You old fool! Lie down and go to sleep.”
“Why shouldn’t I go? Am I to deny myself the loveliness of women if the price is right? I can hear the tinkle of their sweet voices and see the heaving of their white roundness—”
“Oh, shut up!” Doc said.
“What’s the matter, dear friend? I don’t remember that you ever starved for love even when it was less near and less reasonable.”
“You go to hell,” said Doc. “But you go to hell here.”
26
The Developing Storm
At the very moment Doc and Old Jingleballicks were quarreling over a matter neither of them understood, Mack was sitting, body comfortable but spirit disturbed, in Fauna’s office bedroom. In his hand he held a Venetian glass bud vase of whisky. He was pouring out to Fauna a problem that had not come up in his life for many years.
“Don’t think that there ain’t been parties before at the Palace, and fights,” he said. “Why, when the news come that Gay had went to his reward we give a memorial shindig that they don’t hardly do no better at the Salinas Rodeo.[97] Gay would of been proud of it—if he could of got in.”
Fauna said, “There’s talk around that three mourners went to join Gay before nightfall next day.”
“Well, you got to expect a certain amount of accidents,” said Mack modestly. “That was all fine. But this here’s something special. Not only are loyal hearts framing their dear friend for a hunk of charity, but we got a double-header. Right in the Palace Flop house the holy bounds of matrimony got its spikes dug in on the starting line. This here’s a halcyon brawl. I and the boys got real delicate feelings about it.”
95
Tehuanos: Inhabitants, predominantly Zapotec Indians, of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, southeastern Mexico.
96
“Sandunga”: “La Sandunga,” unofficial regional anthem of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, was written by governor and military commander Máximo Ramón Ortiz (d. 1855). It is a sensual, graceful dance song that expresses the grief of a Tehuana (Zapotecan woman) over the death of her mother. The song moves from overwhelming sadness to a sense of acceptance of her loss.
97
Salinas Rodeo: The California Rodeo has taken place each summer at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds since 1911.