“Does your head ache?”
“Yes.”
“Do your joints ache?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have low-blood-pressure depression?”
“Overwhelming.”
“Then I’ve got you,” said Doc. “You get the beer.”
The pale eyes rolled despairingly. “I’ll pay half if you get it.”
“No.”
“Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll loan you the money.”
“No.”
Old Jingleballicks’ eyes were bleak. “Reach me my pants,” he said, and he fished out a quarter and a dime and held them out.
“No,” said Doc.
“God in heaven! What do you want?”
“I want two dollars.”
“Why, that would be six bottles!”
“Exactly. You’re trapped, Old Jingleballicks, and you know it.”
Old Jay dug deep and found two one-dollar bills. “Maybe I can write it off to entertainment,” he said.
Doc pulled on pants and shirt and went across the street. He took his time. He drank a bottle of beer quickly and then sipped a second while he heard the news of the day from Joseph and Mary.
Back in the laboratory he put the four cold remaining bottles on the table.
“Where’s my change?” asked Old Jay.
“I drank your change,” said Doc. He was beginning to feel good. He saw the stricken look. “You cheap old fraud,” he said happily, “for once you’ve been had.” And he went on, “I wish I could understand you. You must have millions and yet you pinch and squirm and cheat. Why?”
“Please give me beer. I’m dying,” said Old Jingleballicks.
“Then die a little longer,” said Doc. “I love to see you die!”
“It’s not my fault,” Old Jay said. “It’s a state of mind. You might call it the American state of mind. The tax laws are creating a whole new kind of man—a psyche rather than a psychosis. Two or three generations and we’ll maybe set the species. Can I have beer now?”
“No.”
“If a man has any money he doesn’t ask, ‘Can I afford this?’ but, ‘Can I deduct it?’ Two men fight over a luncheon check when both of them are going to deduct it anyway—a whole nation conditioned to dishonesty by its laws, because honesty is penalized. But it’s worse than that. If you’ll just hand me a bottle I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me first.”
“I didn’t write the tax laws,” Old Jay said, trembling. “The only creative thing we have is the individual, but the law doesn’t permit me to give money to an individual. I must give it to a group, an organization—and the only thing a group has ever created is bookkeeping. To participate in my gift the individual must become part of the group and thus lose his individuality and his creativeness. I didn’t write the law. I hate a law that stifles generosity and makes charity good business. Corporations are losing their financial efficiency because waste pays. I deplore it, but I do it. I know you need a microscope, but I can’t give it to you because with taxes a four-hundred-dollar microscope costs me twelve hundred dollars—if I give it to you—and nothing if I give it to an institution. Why, if you, through creative work, should win a prize, most of the money would go in taxes. I don’t mind taxes, God knows! But I do mind the kind of law that makes of charity not the full warmness of sharing but a stinking expediency. And now, if you don’t hand me a beer, I shall be forced—”
“Here’s your beer,” said Doc.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“God knows. The party at the Palace Flop house tonight is a masquerade. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ ”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I shall go as a red dwarf,” said Old Jingleballicks.
“A dying star,” said Doc. “It kind of fits you with that hair.”
When the beer was gone they decided that beer made breakfast redundant. Doc went back for six more bottles, and in a burst of generosity he brought back the Bohemia.
“Now there’s beer for you,” said Old Jingleballicks. “The Mexicans are a great and noble people. The Pyramid of the Sun and this beer—whole civilizations have produced less. You started to tell me about your paper last night but you got deflected by a girl. I’d like to see that girl.”
“I’d like to tell you about my paper. I want to draw some parallels between emotional responses in cephalopods and in humans, and I’d like to observe the pathological changes that go with these responses. Now the body walls of octopi are semitransparent. With proper equipment it might be possible to observe these changes as they happen. Sometimes the simpler organisms can give us a key to the more complex. Dementia praecox,[101] for example, was considered purely a psychotic manifestation until it was observed that there were physical symptoms as well.”
“Why don’t you write your paper?”
“I seem to be afraid to. A kind of terror comes over me when I start.”
“What have you got to lose if you fail?”
“Nothing.”
“What have you got to gain if you succeed?”
“I don’t know.”
Old Jingleballicks regarded Doc benignly. “Have you got enough beer in you so you aren’t quarrelsome?”
“I’m never quarrelsome.”
“The hell you aren’t! Took my head off last night. You hurt my feelings.”
“I’m sorry. What did you want to say?”
“Will you let me finish if I start?”
“I’ll try.”
Old Jay said, “You feel to me like a woman who has never had a baby but knows all the words. There’s a lack of fulfillment in you. I think you have violated something or withheld something from yourself—almost as though you were eating plenty but no Vitamin A. You aren’t hungry, but you’re starving. That’s what I think.”
“I can’t imagine anything I lack. I have freedom, comfort, and the work I like. What have I missed?”
“Well, last night, in every conversation, a girl named Suzy crept in—”
“For God’s sake!” said Doc. “Do you know what Suzy is? An illiterate little tramp, a whore! I took her out to dinner because Fauna asked me to. I found her interesting the way I’d find a new species of octopus interesting, that’s all. You’ve always been a goddam fool, Old Jingleballicks, but you’ve never been a romantic damn fool.”
“Who’s talking about romance? I was speaking of hunger. Maybe you can’t be wholly yourself because you’ve never given yourself wholly to someone else.”
“Of all the esoteric goddam nonsense!” Doc cried. “Why I give floor room to you I don’t know.”
“Then try to figure out why you get mad,” said Old Jay.
“What?”
“Well, aren’t you putting a lot of energy into denying something which, if it is not true, deserved no denial?”
“Sometimes I think you’re just plain nuts,” said Doc.
“Know what I’m going to do?” said Old Jay. “I’m going to buy a bottle of whisky.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Doc.
28
Where Alfred the Sacred River Ran[102]
Very few people know that Hazel had given the Palace Flop house its name years ago when the boys had first moved in. Inspired by the glory of having a home, Hazel compounded the name of something he knew about and something he didn’t, the known and the unknown, the homely and the exotic; and, ever after, the name had stuck, so that it was known by certain people from one end of the state to the other. And the Palace Flop house had justified its name over the years. It had been shelter and home base to the boys. Also, some surprising events had occurred there.
The building itself was not impressive—redwood board and bat, tar-paper roof, twenty-eight feet long, fourteen feet wide, two square windows, and two doors, one on each side. Into this simple box Mack and the boys had moved some remarkable articles, the products of their wits, their work, and sometimes their misfortune. The great cast-iron stove was in excellent condition and bid fair to outlast the Colosseum which it resembled. The grandfather clock, once the home of a dog, stood empty now—and Eddie wanted to be buried in it. Each of the beds was canopied as a substitute for mending the roof, and Gay’s bed was kept just as it was when he went away—patchwork quilt turned down to reveal a gray tennis-flannel sheet. His copy of Amazing True Desert Stories, folded open to page 62, lay on top of the apple box just as Gay had left it; and his prize possession, a collector’s item, a ring gear and pinions of a 1914 Willys-Knight,[103] lay on a black velvet cloth in the bottom of the box. On the shelf over his bed the boys kept some kind of nosegay in a swanky swig glass, for Gay had loved flowers. He ate them—particularly red roses, mustard flowers, wild turnip blossoms, and the petals of one variety of dahlia. No one had ever been allowed to sit or sleep in Gay’s bed. He might return one day, the boys thought, even though he was reported dead and his Army insurance paid.
101
Dementia praecox: Any of several psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, characterized by distortions of reality, disturbances of thought and language, and withdrawal from social contact.
102
Where Alfred the Sacred River Ran: Parody of “…Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man…” from “Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1816), a poem by British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
103
1914 Willys-Knight: Willys-Knight automobiles were produced between 1914 and 1933 by Willys-Overland Company of Elyria and Toledo, Ohio. In an internal combustion engine, ring gear and pinions connect the car’s starter with the motor’s flywheel.