Peter follows him to the front of the luncheonette. “Minor,” Caldwell asks, “would it break your heart if I asked you to break a ten-dollar ‘bill?” As Minor takes the bill, Caldwell asks him, “When do you think the Russians will reach Olinger? They’re probably getting on the trolley up at Ely now.”
“Like son, like father, huh Minor?” Johnny Dedman calls from his booth. “Is there any special way you want this?” Minor asks, displeased.
“A five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel.” Caldwell goes on, “I hope they do come. It would be the best thing that happened to this town since the Indians left. They’d line us up against the wall of the post office and put us out of our misery, old bucks like you and me.”
Minor doesn’t want to hear it. He snorts so angrily that Caldwell asks in a high pained voice, his searching voice, “Well what do you think the answer is? We’re all too dumb to die by ourselves.”
As usual, he receives no answer. He accepts the change in silence and gives Peter the five.
“What’s this for?”
“To eat on. Man is a mammal that must eat. We can’t ask Minor to feed you for free, though he’s gentleman enough to do it, I know he is.”
“But where did you get it?”
“It’s O. K.”
By this Peter understands that his father has again borrowed from the school athletic funds that are placed in his trust. Peter understands nothing of his father’s financial involvements except that they are confused and dangerous.
Once as a child, four years ago, he had a dream in which his father was called to account. Face ashen, his father, clad in only a cardboard grocery box beneath which his naked legs showed spindly and yellowish, staggered down the steps of the town hall while a crowd of Olingerites cursed and laughed and threw pulpy dark objects that struck the box with a deadened thump. In that way we have in dreams, where we are both author and character, God and Adam, Peter understood that inside the town hall there had been a trial. His father had been found guilty, stripped of everything he owned, flogged, and sent forth into the world lower than the hoboes. From his pallor plainly the disgrace would kill him. In his dream Peter shouted, “No! You don’t understand! Wait!” The words came out in a child’s voice. He tried to explain aloud to the angry townspeople how innocent his father was, how overworked, worried, conscientious, and anxious; but the legs of the crowd shoved and smothered him and he could not make his voice heard. He woke up with nothing explained. So now, in the luncheonette, it feels to him as if he is accepting a piece of his father’s flayed skin and inserting it into his wallet to be spent on hamburgers, lemon Pepsis, the pinball machine, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups whose chocolate is terrible for his psoriasis.
The pay phone is attached to the wall behind the comic book rack. With a nickel and a dime Caldwell places the call to Firetown. “Cassie? We’re in the luncheonette…It’s fixed. It was the driveshaft…He thinks about twenty bucks, he hadn’t figured out the labor yet. Tell Pop Al asked about him. Pop hasn’t fallen down the stairs yet, has he?…You know I didn’t mean that, I hope he doesn’t too…No, no I haven’t, I haven’t had a second, I gotta be at the dentist in five minutes…To tell the truth, Cassie, I’m scared to hear what he has to say…I know that…I know that…I’d guess around eleven. Have you run out of bread? I bought you an Italian sandwich last night and it’s still sitting in the car…Hugh? He looks O. K., I just gave him five bucks so he can eat… I’ll put him on.”
Caldwell holds the receiver out to Peter. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”
Peter resents that she should invade this way the luncheonette that was the center of his life apart from her. Her voice sounds tiny and stern, as if, in pinching her into this metal box, the telephone company has offended her feelings. The magnetic pull she exerts over him is transmitted through the wires, so that he too feels reduced in size.
“Hi,” he says.
“How does he look to you, Peter?”
“Who?”
“Who? Why Daddy. Who else?”
“Kind of tired and excited, I can’t tell. You know what a puzzle he is.”
“Are you as worried as I am?”
“I guess so, sure.”
“Why hasn’t he called Doc Appleton back?”
“Maybe he doesn’t think the X-rays are developed yet.”
Peter looks toward his father as if to be confirmed. The man is engaging in some elaborate apologetic exchange with Minor: “…didn’t mean to be sarcastic a minute ago about the Communists, I hate ‘em as much as you do, Minor…”
The telephone overhears and asks, “Who’s he talking to?”
“Minor Kretz.”
“He’s just fascinated by that kind of man, isn’t he?” the miniature female voice bitterly remarks in Peter’s ear..”They’re talking about the Russians.”
A kind of cough ticks in the receiver and Peter knows his mother has started crying. His stomach sinks. He casts about for something to say, and his eye like a fly lights on one of the trick turds of painted plaster among the novelties. “How’s the dog?” he asks.
His mother’s breathing struggles for self-control. In the intervals of her crying jags her voice becomes oddly composed and stony. “She was in the house all this morning and I finally let her run after lunch. When she came back she had been after another skunk. Pop’s so mad at me he won’t come out of his room. With no bread in the house, his temper is running short.”
“Do you think Lady killed the skunk?”
“I think so. She was laughing.”
“Daddy says he’s going to the dentist.”
“Yes. Now that it’s too late.” Another wave of silent tears spreads into Peter’s ear; his brain is flooded with the image of how his mother’s eyes would be, red-rimmed and ponderous with water. A faint grainy smell, of grass or corn, affects his nose.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily too late,”, he says. It is pompous and insincere but he is compelled to say something. All the telephone numbers teenagers have penciled on the wall
above the phone begin to swap and swirl under his eyes. His mother sighs. “Yes, I suppose. Peter.”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of your father now.”
“I’ll try. It’s hard though.”
“Isn’t it? But he loves you so.”
“O.K., I’ll try. Do you want him back?”
“No.” She pauses, and then, with that theatrical talent for holding the stage that perhaps is the germ of sense in his father’s fantasy about putting her in vaudeville, she repeats with tremulous import, “No.”
“O.K., we’ll see you around eleven then.” His mother’s mind, shorn of her comforting body, is keenly exhausting to Peter. She senses this, and sounds even more hurt, more re mote, more miniature and stony. “The weatherman wants snow.”
“Yeah, the air kind of feels like it.”
“All right. All right, Peter. Hang up on your poor old mother. You’re a good boy. Don’t worry about anything.”
“O.K., don’t you either. You’re a good woman.” What a thing to say to your own mother! He hangs up, amazed at himself. It makes his scabs itch, the peculiarity of talking to her over the phone, where she becomes, incestuously, a simply female voice with whom he has shared secrets.
“Did she sound upset?” his father asks him.
“A little. I think Pop’s throwing an atmosphere.”
“That man can throw ‘em, too.” Caldwell turns and explains to Minor. “This is my father-in-law. He’s eighty-four and he can throw an atmosphere that knocks you out of your shoes. He can throw an atmosphere right through a key hole in a door. That man has more power in his little finger than you and I have from our bellies up.”