They were singing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
The counterman where Joe usually had breakfast had just finished printing a large crude sign. “Everything on the house. What will you have?”
The girl next to Joe yelped and grabbed his arm, laughed into his face and said: “Tell’m I want gin.”
The man beyond the girl, holding his belly, wavered to the door, whooping with laughter. He kicked the front window out of the nearby liquor store, came back with the gin.
The girl ripped the lop off, lifted the bottle and drank heavily. More bottles were passed around. The liquor store man came in with an armful.
As Joe tried vainly to order his eggs, the girl, gin heavy on her breath, ran warm fingers up the back of Joe’s neck and, breathing rapidly, said: “Honeylamb, I don’t know who you are, but you’re cute as a hug. Who can work on a happy day like this? Come on along with me, huh?”
Joe, still feeling that infuriating smile on his lips, scared al her. She had a very respectable look about her, and she was well-dressed.
Joe meant to say, “No thanks.” He heard himself saying eagerly, “Sure. That sounds fine.”
They went arm in arm along the street and she stopped every ten paces to take another swig out of the bottle. Two blocks further she gave a little sigh, slipped down onto the sidewalk, rolled over onto her back and passed out. She had a warm smile on her lips.
Joe stood over her, laughing emptily, until a whole crowd of people, arm in arm, swept down on him, pushing him along with them. He saw a heavy heel tear open the mouth of the girl on the sidewalk, but Joe couldn’t stop laughing.
He went down Main Street and it was a delirium of laughter and song and the crash and tinkle of plate glass, the crunch of automobile accidents.
There was an enormous scream of laughter, getting closer every moment, and a large woman fell from a great height onto the sidewalk, bursting like a ripe fruit. Joe grew dizzy with laughter. The crowd who had caught him up passed by and Joe Morgan loaned against a building, tears running down his face, his belly cramped and sore from the laughter, but still horror held lightly to his mind with cold fingers.
Through brimming eyes ho saw the street turn into a scone of wild, bacchanalian revel where people without fear, without shame, without modesty, with nothing left but lust and laughter, cavorted, more than half mad with the excesses of their glee.
Slowly he made his way to the News Building. In the lobby he saw Sadie Barnum with a stranger. He saw how eager her lips were and she turned glazed eyes toward Joe and laughed and turned back to the man.
And then he stumbled out, bumping into an old man he had seen in the bank. The old man, with an endless dry chuckle, walked slowly wearing a postman’s mailbag. The bag was crammed full of bills of all denominations. He cackled into Joe’s face, stuffed a handful of bills into Joe’s side pocket, went on down the street, throwing handfuls into the air. The wind whipped them about and they landed on the sidewalk where they wore trampled by people who had no inclination to pick them up.
A fat grinning man sat in the window of the jewelry store, cross-legged, throwing rings out onto the sidewalk through the shattered window.
“Happy New Year!” he yelled as Joe went by.
And then a woman had come from somewhere and she clung to Joe’s neck with moist hands and her eyes were wide and glassy.
Her weight knocked Joe down. He got to his feet and. she lay there and laughed up at him. Joe looked across the street to where a burly man strode along dragging another woman by the wrist. A small cold portion of Joe’s mind told him, “There is Alice. That is Alice. You have to do something.”
He ran between the spasms of helpless laughter and at last he spun the big man around. He wanted to hit him, but instead he collapsed against him and they both howled with insane glee.
Alice sat on the sidewalk, the tears dripping off her chin, her mouth spread in a fantastic smile. He picked her up, held her tightly, staggered off with her. She kept trying to kiss him.
He knew that he had to get her out of there, and soon.
Twice she was taken away from him by men who roared with joy and twice he staggered back, got hold of her again.
A crowd of men were going down the street, tipping over every car, having the time of their lives. A grinning cop watched them. One of the men took out a gun, pointed it at the cop and emptied it. The cop sat down on the street and laughed and hugged his perforated belly until he died.
Two men stood playing Russian Roulette. They passed the gun back and forth and each man spun the chamber before sucking on the barrel, pulling the trigger.
As Joe staggered by, clutching Alice, the gun went off, spattering them both with tiny flecks of brain tissue from the exploded skull. The man lurched into them, yelled, “Wanna play? Come-on, play with me!”
“Play his game, Joe,” Alice squealed.
But Joe, spurred by his hidden store of horror, pulled her along, got her to the car. He shoved her in, climbed behind the wheel, got the motor started.
In the first block a woman tried to ram him. He slammed on the brakes. She went across his bows, smashed two people on the sidewalk and crashed through the main window of a supermarket.
Joe, with Alice gasping helplessly beside him, went three blocks north, turned onto Wilson Avenue and headed out of town. His eyes streamed so that he could barely see.
Ten miles from Daylon he turned up a dirt road, parked in a wide shallow ditch, pulled Alice out of the car, hauled her up across a sloping field to where a wide grassy bank caught the morning sunshine.
They lay side by side and the gasps of laughter came with less and less frequency. Alice, her eyes tortured, pulled herself to her feet, went over behind the shelter of a line of brush and he could hear that she was being very ill. In a few moments the reaction hit him. He was ill, too.
They found a brook at the foot of the field and cleaned up. Their clothes were smeared with dots of blood from the city.
Back on the grassy bank she rolled onto her stomach, cradled her head in her arms and cried monotonously while he gently stroked her dark hair.
Finally she got control of herself. She sat up and he gave her a lighted cigarette.
She said: “I’ll never be without the memory of those hours, Joe. Never.”
He thought of the scenes, still vivid in his mind, “Do you think you’re different?”
“Thank God, Joe, that you found file when you did. Thank God that you kept hold of a little bit of sanity! There was a cold objective place down in me and I could see everything around me and I knew the horror of it, but I couldn’t stop joining in.”
“Me, too. My mouth’s sore from laughing. And my sides.”
Because it had to be talked out, because it couldn’t be permitted to stay inside to fester, they told of what they had seen, leaving much unsaid, but nothing misunderstood.
He told her about Sadie Barnum and her eyes were soft with pity.
After a long silence he said: “What can we do?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I won’t let you go back, Joe.”
“What could I do if I went back? Pick the money off the streets?”
He remembered the old man with the mailbag. He took the crumpled bills out of his pocket. Seven hundreds, three fifties and four ones.
Her fingers were light on his arm. “Joe, we’ve got to let the rest of the country know what happens.”
He shrugged. “They wouldn’t even print my dispatches. Why should they listen to me now?”