Cattycorner across from the trophy case with its hundred highlights, Zimmerman’s door is shut. As Caldwell strides by, it pops open and Mrs. Herzog steps out at a slant under his nose. She is as startled as he; her eyes widen behind her cockeyed butterscotch hornrims and her peacock-feathered hat sits crooked as if with shock. She is, from Caldwell’s height of age, a young woman; her oldest child has just reached the seventh grade. Already, ripples of protective agitation are spreading upwards from this child through the faculty. She got herself elected to the school board to guarantee personally her children’s education. From his professional heart, Caldwell despises these meddling mothers; they haven’t a clue as to what education is: a jungle, an unholy mess. Arrogantly her mouth in its blurred purplish lipstick refuses to frame a smile of confessed surprise, instead remaining ajar in frank amazement, like a stuck letter slot.
Caldwell breaks the silence. An urchin’s impudence, revived from deep in his childhood by the forgotten sensation of nearly having his nose socked, dimples his face as he tells her, Mrs. Herzog of the school board, “Boy, the way you came out of that door reminded me of a cuckoo clock!”
Her air of interrupted dignity, ridiculous in one not yet out of her thirties and leaning her weight on a doorknob, freezes the harder at this greeting. With glassied eyes he resumes his walk to the end of the hall. Not until he has bucked open the wire-reinforced double doors and started down the steps under the yellow wall where since yesterday the word fuck has been scrubbed away, does the fist sink “into his stomach. His goose, cooked. What in hell had the pushy bitch been doing in there? He had felt Zimmerman’s presence behind her in his office, a dark cloud; he could feel Zimmerman’s atmosphere through a keyhole. She had shoved open the door like a woman making a point at her back and not dreaming her front was exposed. Caldwell in his present state cannot afford another enemy. Tickets 18001 to 18145, Zimmerman’s report saying in black and blue that he hit the kid in class, and now this: bumping into Mim Herzog with her lipstick smeared. A bubble expands in his throat and, stepping into the open, he takes in fresh air with a gasp as sharp as a sob. Blurred crimped clouds have been lowered tangent to the town’s slate roofs. The roofs seem greasily lustrous with sullen inner knowledge. The atmosphere feels pregnant with a hastening fate. Lifting his head and sniffing, Caldwell experiences a vivid urge to walk on faster, to canter right past Hummel’s, to romp neighing through the front door and out the back door of any house in Olinger that stood in his way, to gallop up the brushy brown winter-burned flank of Shale Hill and on, on, over hills that grow smoother and bluer with distance, on and on on a southeast course cutting diagonally across highways and rivers frozen solid as highways until at last he drops, his head in death extended toward Baltimore.
The herd has deserted Minor’s. Only three persons in habit the luncheonette: Minor himself, Johnny Dedman, and that atrocious ego Peter Caldwell, the science teacher’s son. All but the shiftless and homeless are at their own tables at this hour. Five-forty. Next door, the post office has closed. Mrs. Passify, moving tenderly on worn legs, lowers the grates on the windows and eases shut the drawers colorful with stamps and inserts the counted money into the mock-Corinthian safe. Behind her, the back room seems a battle field hospital where gray mail sacks lie unconscious, steeped in an anesthesia of shadows, prone, misshapen, and disembowelled. She sighs and goes to the window. To a passerby on the pavement her great -round face would seem the face of a grotesquely swollen child straining to peek out of a tiny port-hole, the goldleaf O at the zenith of the arc of letters spelling post office.
Beside her, Minor methodically twists his coarse white cloth into the steaming throat of each Coca-Cola glass before he sets it down on the towel he has spread beside his sink. Each glass continues to give off a few wisps of mist as the cool air licks it. Through his window, which is beginning to fog, the pike is ripe with cars hurrying home-a laden branch whose fruit glows. The luncheonette behind him is all but empty, like a stage. It has been supporting a debate. Within, Minor is a cauldron of rage; his hairy nostrils seem seething vents.
“Minor,” Peter calls from his booth, “you’re old-fashioned. There’s nothing wrong with Communism. In twenty years we’ll have it in this country and you’ll be happy as a clam.”
Minor turns from the window, dome flashing, brain raging. “If old FDR had lived we’d have it,” he says, and laughs angrily, so that his nostrils spread under the burst of pressure. “But he went and killed himself, or else he died of syphilis. God’s judgement: mark my words.”
“Minor, you don’t believe that. You couldn’t be sane and believe that.”
“I believe it,” Minor says. “He was rotten in the head when he went to Yalta or we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now.”
“What fix? What fix, Minor? This country is sitting on top of the world. We got the big bomb and we got the big bombers.”
“Arrrhh.” Minor turns away.
“What fix? What fix, Minor? What fix?”
He turns back and says, “The Ruskies’ll be in France and Italy before the year’s over.”
“So what? So what, Minor? Communism has to come, one way or another; it’s the only way to beat poverty.”
Johnny Dedman in a separate booth is smoking his eighth Camel of the hour and is trying to blow one smoke ring through another. Now he cries, without warning, the word “War!” and with his finger rat-tat-tats the big brown button knotted onto the end of the light cord above his head.
Minor comes back in his narrow runway behind the counter the better to address the boys in their dim booths. “We should’ve kept marching when we hit the Elbe and taken Moscow when we had the chance. They were rotten and ready for us, the Russian soldier is the most cowardly in the world. The peasants would have risen up to greet us. That’s what old Churchill wanted us to do, and he was right. He was a crook but clever, clever. He didn’t love Old Joe. Nobody, in the world loved Old Joe but King Franklin.”.Peter says, “Minor, you really are insane. What about Leningrad? They weren’t cowardly then.”
“They didn’t win it. They did not win it. Our equipment won it. Our tanks. Our guns. Sent courtesy free parcel post by your good friend FDR; he robbed the American people to save the Russians who then turn right around and are ready to march this minute over the Alps into Italy.”
“He was trying to beat Hitler, Minor. Don’t you remember? Adolf H-I-T-L-E-R.”
“I love Hitler,” Johnny Dedman announces. “He’s alive in Argentina.”
“Minor loved him too,” Peter says, reedy-voiced with fury and hot in all his limbs. “Didn’t you, Minor? Didn’t you think Hitler was a nice man?”
“I never did,” Minor says. “But I’ll tell you this. I’d rather have Hitler alive than old Joe Stalin. There is the Devil Incarnate. You mark my words.”
“Minor, what do you have against Communism? They wouldn’t make you go to work. You’re too old. You’re too sick.”
“Bam. Bam” Johnny Dedman cries. “We should’ve dropped an atom bomb on Moscow, Berlin, Paris, France, Italy, Mexico City, and Africa. Ka-Pow. I love that mushroom-shaped cloud.”
“Minor,” Peter says. “Minor. Why do you exploit us poor teenagers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal? You’ve got the board of the pinball machine tilted so steeply nobody except Dedman can get any free games out of it and he’s a genius.”
“I am a genius,” Dedman says. “They don’t even believe in a Divine Creator,” Minor states.
“Well, my God, who does?” Peter exclaims, blushing for himself but unable to halt, so anxious is he to pin this man who with his black Republican stupidity and stubborn animal vigor embodies everything in the world that is killing Peter’s father; he has to keep Minor from turning his back, he has to hold, as it were, the world open. “You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. Really.” Yet in this boast, now that it is issued, Peter perceives an abysmal betrayal of his father. In his mind he sees his father slip into a pit stunned. He waits, so hungrily his mouth feels parched, for Minor’s rejoinder, whatever it might be, so that in the twists and detours of argument he can find a way to retract. So much of Peter’s energy is spent in wishing he could take back things he has said. “I believe you,” Minor says simply, turning. The way out is sealed.