“Whoopee! What a way to go!” hoots Jesse, slapping his leg. He takes a final pleasurable pull, his pale blue eyes fixed remotely on Gus’s run, and passes the butt between fingertips to Ilya. “Shit, boys, that musta been somethin’ to see!” Yes, it’s going to be a good song.
“Maybe those ten shmucks who got killed ran interference for him,” suggests Harry sarcastically. “That’s how many’s on a football team, isn’t it?”
Jesse laughs. “You think they were countin’, Harry?”
“I heard a rumor down at the theater he might’ve been a police informer,” Ilya says. We turn to watch him. He drops the butt, about the size of a used pencil eraser, onto the wet sidewalk and pointlessly steps on it, and as he does so seems to step into our circle. Or toward it anyway.
“What’s that—?” asks Harry.
“You know, maybe the cops recognized him as one of their own pals and held their fire.”
“No,” I say, “they shot at him all right. At least according to what Leo says. In fact, before he got to the end, everybody was trying to get him, throwing or shooting whatever they had at him. He’d become like some kind of terrifying symbol or something, but they couldn’t hit him. It was only when he’d finished his run and turned back to trot toward the cops with his arms stretched out in a V above his head that one of them shot him. This came as a complete surprise to him, of course. Leo says he just stood there, crumpling, that panicky twitching look in his face that always comes over him when he gets his signals crossed, and then the gas grenade blew up. That’s when Leo said he left.”
“A good story,” harrumphs Harry. “Leo’s still got his touch. But I don’t believe it. Like my old bobbeh used to say, nisht geshtoigen, nisht gefloigen — it don’t stand, it don’t fly. Except that part about Leo never staying around when the shooting starts. That had a ring of truth…”
“Whaddaya think about that rumor, Meyer?” Jesse asks. “What Ilya here was sayin’—you think ole Gus mighta been a Judas goat?”
“I don’t know. That one was going around the hospital today, too. The cops weren’t denying it, but maybe that’s because they don’t want to admit they’ve killed a famous middle-class hero. In fact, they were trying to suggest he might have been shot in the line of duty by one of the strikers, not by a cop at all, but not even the Trib seems to be buying that one.”
“Still, think about it — he had all the gear, didn’t he? Even a disguise! You always said he was like playactin’ alla time, but he didn’t seem to have no center. Maybe that was jist on accounta he couldn’t show us the center…”
“Well…”
“Oi! it all fits!” cries Harry, slapping his round cheeks. “Why didn’t we see it before? A f’kucken mosser! We’re all geshtupped!”
“Maybe,” I laugh, “but I doubt it. I like Leo’s story better. Anyway, Leo’s pretty sure we cleaned most of them out Friday and Saturday.” I point to my eye and the others grin, all but Ilya, who seems unable to look at it.
“Hey, it’s fucking cold and wet out here,” he complains. “Let’s get something to drink, goddamn it!”
Jesse grins and wraps a bony arm around him. “Wiser words, Ilya ole buddy,” he says with a fake drunken slur, “was never spoke! C’mon, it’s dog-fuckin’ time, brothers!”
“Join us, Meyer,” says Harry, searching for me through his thick wet glasses. “I’ll buy you a glezel your Moldavskaya syrup.”
“No, thanks. I’m going home and get some work done.” They look surprised at this. I hope they’ll take the hint. I’ll start by repairing the cat, the one made of pennyworth nails. Find a place in it for one of these railroad spikes in my pocket. To prop up the fused belly, maybe. Scar tissue. “It’s been awhile, you know…”
“Well, so that’s good,” says Harry, slapping my shoulder. He seems genuinely pleased. “Maybe we’ll stop by later and see how it’s going.”
“Yeah, an’, hey, pick me up somethin’ cheap at Polly the Greek’s, will ya, Meyer?” says Jesse, fishing for change. He drops a quarter in my hand, tips his long-billed cap, and they drift off, through the drizzle, stubby half-blind Harry, pale Ilya, and Jesse with his long skinny arms around the pair of them, singing snatches from Casey Bill’s “WPA Blues”—
“… Early next mornin’ while I was layin’ in my bed,
I heerd a mighty rumble of bricks comin’ down on my head,
So I had to start duckin’ and dodgin’ and be on my way,
They was tearin’ my house down on me—
That housewreckin’ crew from the WPA!”
Jesse first sang us that song at the famous farewell party for Maxie in my studio back in March. It’s strange to think how much everything’s changed since then. That party was maybe the best one we’ve ever had. Sometimes I find it hard to believe in my own reality — the very idea of a conscious passage into and out of time seems like some kind of terrifying fairytale — but that night I felt very much at one with my own life and the lives of those around me. I even got a little drunk, unusual for me. My drinking habits are a kind of standing joke on Chicago’s North Side, especially since my studio is an old plumbing supplies warehouse once used during Prohibition, according to local legend, as a clandestine liquor depot by Bugs Moran’s gang. All I ever have is the occasional glass of sweet wine, the last vestige (I’ve thought until recently) of my rejected West Side childhood. That night I had several and soon became giddy and noisy in spite of myself, and I even danced a kazatzke. Or what I hoped passed for one, never having actually danced one before. Squatting and kicking the prisiadka, while the others clapped and chanted, I’d thought: This is what I’ve always wanted to do! Terrible sick hangover the next day — maybe we sweet-wine drinkers are the hardest and most self-punishing of all — but it was a small price to pay.
The party had been called with hardly any planning to celebrate the victory at Guadalajara and to say goodbye to Maxie. Maxie was on his way to join the Lincoln Battalion in Spain: he thought of it as a rite of passage on his route to Palestine. We all love and admire Maxie very much and were afraid for him, and hopeful. Ilya’s brother David was already over there, crossing in the Christmas season with the first Americans to go, and our old West Coast CIO friends Eskill and Nicco and Richie as well. Many of us thought we’d be following. There was a real chance now. The Fascist advance had been stopped at last at the very edge of Madrid. We hadn’t heard the worst about Jarama yet, didn’t know that night that the untrained Lincolns had been almost wiped out in the mad attempt on Suicide Hill and were badly demoralized, didn’t know that David had lost two of his limbs and that Nicco was dead, we only knew that the Americans had heroically held the line there against immeasurable odds: the Fascists did not pass. And now the greatest victory of the war: Mussolini’s Blackshirt “volunteers”—there are said to be eighty thousand of them fighting for Franco in Spain, in spite of the so-called “Nonintervention Pact”—had been routed at Guadalajara, and in large part by their own countrymen, the famous Garibaldis of the International Brigade. The government counteroffensive, it was said, had begun. Newly trained Spanish divisions were being rushed to the front to replace the Italian Internationals. Russian tanks and guns had arrived, in fact they’d already helped win the battle at Guadalajara, and support from other countries like America, England, and France must not be far behind. It was in their own self-interest, after all. Roosevelt seemed to be hinting as much, and his new election mandate had freed him — indeed, obliged him — to act. Or anyway that’s what we chose to believe that night. Many, unable to hear the awful afterclap of silence following Guernica, choose to believe it still. In the end it is, as it has no doubt always been, a naked contest between heart and steel. Must heart always win? Or rather: can it ever win? Leo laughs and says no, but that night he was a minority of one.