Ironweed

III

Rudy left them to flop someplace, half-drunk on six beers, and Francis, Helen, and Pee Wee walked back along Green Street to Madison and then west toward the mission. Walk Pee Wee home and go get a room at Palombo’s Hotel, get warm, stretch out, rest them bones. Because Francis and Helen had money: five dollars and seventyfive cents. Two of it Helen had left from what Francis gave her last night; plus three-seventy-five out of his cemetery wages, for he spent little in The Gilded Cage, Oscar buying twice as many drinks as he took money for.

The city had grown quiet at midnight and the moon was as white as early snow. A few cars moved slowly on Pearl Street but otherwise the streets were silent. Francis turned up his suitcoat collar and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. Alongside the mission the moon illuminated Sandra, who sat where they had left her. They stopped to look at her condition. Francis squatted and shook her.

“You sobered up yet, lady?”

Sandra answered him with an enveloping silence. Francis pushed the cowl off her face and in the vivid moonlight saw the toothmarks on her nose and cheek and chin. He shook his head to clear the vision, then saw that one of her fingers and the flesh between forefinger and thumb on her left hand had been chewed.

“The dogs got her.”

He looked across the street and saw a red-eyed mongrel waiting in the half-lit corner of an alley and he charged after it, picking up a stone as he went. The cur fled down the alley as Francis turned his ankle on a raised sidewalk brick and sprawled on the pavement. He picked himself up, he now bloodied too by the cur, and sucked the dirt out of the cuts.

As he crossed the street, goblins came up from Broadway, ragged and masked, and danced around Helen. Pee Wee, bending over Sandra, straightened up as the goblin dance gained in ferocity.

“Jam and jelly, big fat belly,” the goblins yelled at Helen. And when she drew herself inward they only intensified the chant.

“Hey you kids,” Francis yelled. “Let her alone.”

But they danced on and a skull goblin poked Helen in the stomach with a stick. As she swung at the skull with her hand, another goblin grabbed her purse and then all scattered.

“Little bastards, devils,” Helen cried, running after them. And Francis and Pee Wee too joined the chase, pounding through the night, no longer sure which one wore the skull mask. The goblins ran down alleys, around corners, and fled beyond capture.

Francis turned back to Helen, who was far behind him. She was weeping, gasping, doubled over in a spasm of loss.

“Sonsabitches,” Francis said.

“Oh the money,” Helen said, “the money.”

“They hurt you with that stick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That money ain’t nothin’. Get more tomorrow.”

“It was.”

“Was what?”

“There was fifteen dollars in there besides the other.”

“Fifteen? Where’d you get fifteen dollars?”

“Your son Billy gave it to me. The night he found us at Spanish George’s. You were passed out and he gave us forty-five dollars, all the cash he had. I gave you thirty and kept the fifteen.”

“I went through that pocketbook. I didn’t see it.”

“I pinned it inside the lining so you wouldn’t drink it up. I wanted our suitcase back. I wanted our room for a week so I could rest.”

“Goddamn it, woman, now we ain’t got a penny. You and your sneaky goddamn ways.”

Pee Wee came back from the chase empty-handed.

“Some tough kids around here,” he said. “You okay, Helen?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“You’re not hurt?”

“Not anyplace you could see.”

“Sandra,” Pee Wee said. “She’s dead.”

“She’s more than that,” Francis said. “She’s partly chewed away.”

“We’ll take her inside so they don’t eat no more of her,” Pee Wee said. “I’ll call the police.”

“You think it’s all right to bring her inside?” Francis asked. “She’s still got all that poison in her system.”

Pee Wee said nothing and opened the mission door. Francis picked Sandra up from the dust and carried her inside. He put her down on an old church bench against the wall and covered her face with the scratchy blanket that had become her final gift from the world.

“If I had my rosary I’d say it for her,” Helen said, sitting on a chair beside the bench and looking at Sandra’s corpse. “But it was in my purse. I’ve carried that rosary for twenty years.”

“I’ll check the vacant lots and the garbage cans in the mornin’,” Francis said. “It’ll turn up.”

“I’ll bet Sandra prayed to die,” Helen said.

“Hey,” said Francis.

“I would if I was her. Her life wasn’t human anymore.”

Helen looked at the clock: twelve-ten. Pee Wee was calling the police.

“Today’s a holy day of obligation,” she said. “It’s All Saints’ Day.”

“Yup,” said Francis.

“I want to go to church in the morning.”

“All right, go to church.”

“I will. I want to hear mass.”

“Hear it. That’s tomorrow. What are we gonna do tonight? Where the hell am I gonna put you?”

“You could stay here,” Pee Wee said. “All the beds are full but you can sleep down here on a bench.”

“No,” Helen said. “I’d rather not do that. We can go up to Jack’s. He told me I could come back if I wanted.”

“Jack said that?” Francis asked.

“Those were his words.”

“Then let’s shag ass. Jack’s all right. Clara’s a crazy bitch but I like Jack. Always did. You sure he said that?”

“‘Come back anytime,’ he said as I was going out the door.”

“All right. Then we’ll move along, old buddy,” Francis said to Pee Wee. “You’ll figure it out with Sandra?”

“I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.

“You know her last name?”

“No. Never heard it.”

“Don’t make much difference now.”

“Never did,” Pee Wee said.

o o o

Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.

Aldo Campione, walking on the opposite side of North Pearl from Francis and Helen, raised his right hand in the same ambiguous gesture Francis had witnessed at the bar. As Francis speculated on the meaning, the man who had been sitting with Aldo stepped out of the shadows into a streetlight’s glow, and Aldo’s gesture then became clear: it introduced Francis to Dick Doolan, the bum who tried to cut off Francis’s feet with a meat cleaver.

“I went to the kid’s grave today,” Francis said.

“What kid?”

“Gerald.”

“Oh, you did?” she said. “Then that was the first time, wasn’t it? It must’ve been.”

“Right.”

“You’re thinking about him these days. You mentioned him last week.”

“I never stop thinkin’ about him.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel of this city, city once his, city lost. The commerce along with its walls jarred him: so much new, stores gone out of business he never even heard of. Some things remained: Whitney’s, Myers’, the old First Church, which rose over Clinton Square, the Pruyn Library. As he walked, the cobblestones turned to granite, houses became stores, life aged, died, renewed itself, and a vision of what had been and what might have been intersected in an eye that could not really remember one or interpret the other. What would you give never to have left, Francis?

“I said, what’s got into you?”

“Nothin’s got into me. I’m just thinkin’ about a bunch of stuff. This old street. I used to own this street, once upon a time.”

“You should’ve sold it when you had the chance.”

“Money. I ain’t talkin’ about money.”

“I didn’t think you were. That was a funny.”

“Wasn’t much funny. I said I saw Gerald’s grave. I talked to him.”

“Talked? How did you talk?”

“Stood and talked to the damn grass. Maybe I’m gettin’ nutsy as Rudy. He can’t hold his pants up. they fall over his shoes.”

“You’re not nutsy, Francis. It’s because you’re here. We shouldn’t be here. We should go someplace else.”

“Right. That’s where we oughta go. Else.”

“Don’t drink any more tonight.”

“Listen here. Don’t you nag my ass.”

“I want you straight, please. I want you straight.”

“I’m the straightest thing you’ll see all week. I am so straight. I’m the straightest thing you’ll sweek. The thing that happened on the other side of the street. The thing that happened was Billy told me stuff about Annie. I never told you that. Billy told me stuff about Annie, how she never told I dropped him.”

“Never told who, the police?”

“Never nobody. Never a damn soul. Not Billy, not Peg, not her brother, not her sisters. Ain’t that the somethin’est thing you ever heard? I can’t see a woman goin’ through that stuff and not tellin’ nobody about it.”

“You’ve got a lot to say about those people.”

“Not much to say.”

“Maybe you ought to go see them.”

“No, that wouldn’t do no good.”

“You’d get it out of your system.”

“What out of my system?”

“Whatever it is that’s in there.”

“Never mind about my system. How come you wouldn’t stay at the mission when you got an invite?”

“I don’t want their charity.”

“You ate their soup.”

“I did not. All I had was coffee. Anyway, I don’t like Chester. He doesn’t like Catholics.”

“Catholics don’t like Methodists. What the hell, that’s even. And I don’t see any Catholic missions down here. I ain’t had any Catholic soup lately.”

“I won’t do it and that’s that.”

“So freeze your ass someplace. Your flower’s froze already.”

“Let it freeze.”

“You sang a song at least.”

“Yes I did. I sang while Sandra was dying.”

“She’da died no matter. Her time was up.”

“No, I don’t believe that. That’s fatalism. I believe we die when we can’t stand it anymore. I believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can, and Sandra decided she could die.”

“I don’t fight that. Die when you can. That’s as good a sayin’ as there is.”

“I’m glad we agree on something,” Helen said.

“We get along all right. You ain’t a bad sort.”

“You’re all right too.”

“We’re both all right,” Francis said, “and we ain’t got a damn penny and noplace to flop. We on the bum. Let’s get the hell up to Jack’s before he puts the lights out on us.”

Helen slipped her arm inside Francis’s. Across the street Aldo Campione and Dick Doolan, who in the latter years of his life was known as Rowdy Dick, kept silent pace.

o o o

Helen pulled her arm away from Francis and tightened her collar around her neck, then hugged herself and buried her hands in her armpits.

“I’m chilled to my bones,” she said.

“It’s chilly, all right.”

“I mean a real chill, a deep chill.”

Francis put his arm around her and walked her up the steps of Jack’s house. It stood on the east side of Ten Broeck Street, a three-block street in Arbor Hill named for a Revolutionary War hero and noted in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where a dozen of the city’s arriviste lumber barons lived, all in a row, in competitive luxury. For their homes the barons built handsome brownstones, most of them now cut into apartments like Jack’s, or into furnished rooms.

The downstairs door to Jack’s opened without a key. Helen and Francis climbed the broad walnut staircase, still vaguely elegant despite the threadbare carpet, and Francis knocked. Jack opened the door and looked out with the expression of an ominous crustacean. With one hand he held the door ajar, with the other he gripped the jamb.

“Hey Jack,” Francis said, “we come to see ya. How’s chances for a bum gettin’ a drink?”

Jack opened the door wider to look beyond Francis and when he saw Helen he let his arm fall and backed into the apartment. Kate Smith came at them, piped out of a small phonograph through the speaker of the radio. The Carolina moon was shining on somebody waiting for Kate. Beside the phonograph sat Clara, balancing herself on a chamber pot, propped on all sides with purple throw pillows, giving her the look of being astride a great animal. A red bedspread covered her legs, but it had fallen away at one side, revealing the outside of her naked left thigh, visible to the buttocks. A bottle of white fluid sat on the table by the phonograph, and on a smaller table on her other side a swinging rack cradled a gallon of muscatel, tiltable for pouring. Helen walked over to Clara and stood by her.

“Golly it’s cold for this time of year, and they’re calling for snow. Just feel my hands.”

“This happens to be my home,” Clara said hoarsely, “and I ain’t about to feel your hands, or your head either. I don’t see any snow.”

“Have a drink,” Jack said to Francis.

“Sure,” Francis said. “I had a bowl of soup about six o’clock but it went right through me. I’m gonna have to eat somethin’ soon.”

“I don’t care whether you eat or not,” Jack said.

Jack went to the kitchen and Francis asked Clara: “You feelin’ better?”

“No.”

“She’s got the runs,” Helen said.

“I’ll tell people what I got,” Clara said.

“She lost her husband this week,” Jack said, returning with two empty tumblers. He tilted the jug and half-filled both.

“How’d you find out?” Helen said.

“I saw it in the paper today,” Clara said.

“I took her to the funeral this morning,” Jack said. “We got a cab and went to the funeral home. They didn’t even call her.”

“He didn’t look any different than when I married him.”

“No kiddin’,” Francis said.

“Outside of his hair was snow-white, that’s all.”

“Her kids were there,” Jack said.

“The snots,” Clara said.

“Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead,” Francis said. “Helen’d probably go crazy.”

“Why if you dropped dead she’d bury you before you started stinkin’, “ Jack said. “That’s all’d happen.”

“What a heart you have,” Francis said.

“You gotta bury your dead,” Jack said.

“That’s a rule of the Catholic church,” said Helen.

“I’m not talkin’ about the Catholic church,” Francis said.

“Anyway, now she’s a single girl,” Jack said, “I’m gonna find out what Clara’s gonna do.”

“I’m gonna go right on livin’ normal,” Clara said.

“Normal is somethin’,” Francis said. “What the hell is normal anyway, is what I’d like to know. Normal is cold. Goddamn it’s cold tonight. My fingers. I rubbed myself to see if I was livin’. You know, I wanna ask you one question.”

“No,” Clara said.

“You said no. Whataya mean no?”

“What’s he gonna ask?” Jack said. “Find out what he’s gonna ask.”

Clara waited.

“How’s everythin’ been goin’?” Francis asked.

o o o

Clara lifted the bottle of white fluid from the phonograph table, where the Kate Smith record was scratching in its final groove, and drank. She shook her head as it went down, and the greasy, uncombed stringlets of her hair leaped like whips. Her eyes hung low in their sockets, a pair of collapsing moons. She recapped the bottle and then swigged her muscatel to drive out the taste. She dragged on her cigarette, then coughed and spat venomously into a wadded handkerchief she held in her fist.

“Things ain’t been goin’ too good for Clara,” Jack said, turning off the phonograph.

“I’m still trottin’,” Clara said.

“Well you look pretty good for a sick lady,” Francis said. “Look as good as usual to me.”

Clara smiled over the rim of her wineglass at Francis.

“Nobody,” said Helen, “asked how things are going for me, but I’ll tell you. They’re going just wonderful. Just wonderful.”

“She’s drunker than hell,” Francis said.

“Oh I’m loaded to the gills,” Helen said, giggling. “I can hardly walk.”

“You ain’t drunk even a nickel’s worth,” Jack said. “Franny’s the drunk one. You’re hopeless, right. Franny?”

“Helen’ll never amount to nothin’ if she stays with me,” Francis said.

“I always thought you were an intelligent man,” Jack said, and he swallowed half his wine, “but you can’t be, you can’t be.”

“You could be mistaken,” Helen said.

“Keep out of it,” Francis told her, and he hooked a thumb at her, facing Jack. “There’s enough right there to put you in the loony bin, just worryin’ about where she’s gonna live, where she’s gonna stay.”

“I think you could be a charmin’ man,” Jack said, “if you’d only get straight. You could have twenty dollars in your pocket at all times, make fifty, seventy-five a week, have a beautiful apartment with everything you want in it, all you want to drink, once you get straight.”

“I worked today up at the cemetery,” Francis said.

“Steady work?” asked Jack.

“Just today. Tomorrow I gotta see a fella needs some liftin’ done. The old back’s still tough enough.”

“You keep workin’ you’ll have fifty in your pocket.”

“I had fifty, I’d spend it on her,” Francis said. “Or buy a pair of shoes. Other pair wore out and Harry over at the old clothes joint give ‘em to me for a quarter. He seen me half barefoot and says, Francis you can’t go around like that, and he give me these. But they don’t fit right and I only got one of ‘ em laced. Twine there in the other one. I got a shoestring in my pocket but ain’t put it in yet.”

“You mean you got the shoelace and you didn’t put it in the shoe?” Clara asked.

“I got it in my pocket,” Francis said.

“Then put it in the shoe.”

“I think it’s in this pocket here. You know where it is, Helen?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Look and see,” Clara said.

“She wants me to put a shoestring in my shoe,” Francis said.

“Right,” said Clara.

Francis stopped fumbling in his pocket and let his hands fall away.

“I’m renegin’,” he said.

“You’re what?” Clara asked.

“I’m renegin’ and I don’t like to do that.”

o o o

Francis put down his wine, walked to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet, cover down, trying to understand why he’d lied about a shoestring. He smelled the odor that came up from his fetid crotch and stood up then and dropped his trousers. He stepped out of them, then pulled off his shorts and threw them in the sink. He lifted the toilet cover and sat on the seat, and with Jack’s soap and handfuls of water from the bowl, he washed his genitals and buttocks, and all their encrusted orifices, crevices, and secret folds. He rinsed himself, relathered, and rinsed again. He dried himself with one of Jack’s towels, picked his shorts out of the sink, and mopped the floor with them where he had splashed water. Then he filled the sink with hot water and soaked the shorts. He soaped them and they separated into two pieces in his hands. He let the water out of the sink, wrung the shorts, and put them in his coat pocket. He opened the door a crack and called out: “Hey, Jack,” and when Jack came, Francis hid his nakedness with a towel.

“Jack, old buddy, you got an old pair of shorts? Any old pair. Mine just ripped all to hell.”

“I’ll go look.”

“Could I borry the use of your razor?”

“Help yourself.”

Jack came back with the shorts and Francis put them on. Then, as Francis soaped his beard, Aldo Campione and Rowdy Dick Doolan entered the bathroom. Rowdy Dick, dapper in a three-piece blue-serge suit and a pearlgray cap, sat on the toilet, cover down. Aldo made himself comfortable on the rim of the tub, his gardenia unintimidated by the chill of the evening. Jack’s razor wouldn’t cut Francis’s three-day beard, and so he rinsed off the lather, soaked his face again in hot water, and relatheied. While Francis rubbed the soap deeply into his beard, Rowdy Dick studied him but could remember nothing of Francis’s face. This was to be expected, for when last seen, it was night in Chicago, under a bridge not far from the railyards, and five men were sharing the wealth in 1930, a lean year. On the wall of the abutment above the five, as one of them had pointed out, a former resident of the space had inscribed a poem:

Poor little lamb,

He wakes up in the morning,

His fleece all cold.

He knows what’s coming.

Say, little lamb,

We’ll go on the bummer this summer.

We’ll sit in the shade

And drink lemonade,

The world’ll be on the hummer.

Rowdy Dick remembered this poem as well as he remembered the laughter of his sister, Mary, who was striped dead, sleigh riding, under the rails of a horsedrawn sleigh; as clearly as he remembered the plaintive, dying frown of his brother, Ted, who perished from a congenital hole in the heart. They had been three until then, living with an uncle because their parents had died, one by one, and left them alone. And then there was Dick, truly alone, who grew up tough, worked the docks, and then found an easier home in the Tenderloin, breaking the faces of nasty drunks, oily pickpockets, and fat tittypinchers. But that didn’t last either. Nothing lasted for Rowdy Dick, and he went on the bum and wound up under the bridge with Francis Phelan and three other now-faceless men. What he did remember of Francis was his hand, which now held a razor that stroked the soapy cheek.

What Francis remembered was talking about baseball that famous night. He’d begun by reliving indelible memories of his childhood as a way of explaining, at leisurely pace since none of them had anyplace to go, the generation of his drive to become a third baseman. He had been, he was saying, a boy playing among men, witnessing their talents, their peculiarities, their capacity to dive for a grounder, smash a line drive, catch a fly-all with the very ease of breath itself. They had played in the Van Woert Street polo grounds (Mulvaney’s goat pasture) and there were a heroic dozen and a half of them who came two or three evenings a week, some weeks, after work to practice; men in their late twenties and early thirties, reconstituting the game that had enraptured them in their teens. There was Andy Heffern, tall, thin, saturnine, the lunger who would die at Saranac, who could pitch but never run, and who played with a long-fingered glove that had no padding whatever in the pocket, only a wisp of leather that stood between the speed of the ball and Andy’s most durable palm. There was Windy Evans, who played outfield in his cap, spikes, and jock, and who caught the ball behind his back, long flies he would outrun by twenty minutes, and then plop would go that dilatory fly ball into the peach basket of his glove; and Windy would leap and beam and tell the world: There’s only a few of us left! And Red Cooley, the shortstop who was the pepper of Erancis’s ancient imagination, and who never stopped the chatter, who leaped at every ground ball as if it were the brass ring to heaven, and who, with his short-fingered glove, wanted for nothing to be judged the world’s greatest living ball player, if only it hadn’t been for the homegrown deference that kept him a prisoner of Arbor Hill for the rest of his limited life.

These reminiscences by Francis evoked from Rowdy Dick an envy that surpassed reason. Why should any man be so gifted not only with so much pleasurable history but also with a gift of gab that could mesmerize a quintet of bums around a fire under a bridge? Why were there no words that would unlock what lay festering in the heart of Rowdy Dick Doolan, who needed so desperately to express what he could never even know needed expression?

Well, the grand question went unanswered, and the magic words went undiscovered. For Rowdy Dick took vengeful focus on the shoes of the voluble Francis, which were both the most desirable and, except for the burning sticks and boards in the fire, the most visible objects under that Chicago bridge. And Rowdy Dick reached inside his shirt, where he kept the small meat cleaver he had carried ever since Colorado, and slid it out of its carrying case, which he had fashioned from cardboard, oilcloth, and string; and he told Francis then: I’m gonna cut your goddamn feet off; explaining this at first and instant lunge, but explaining, even then, rather too soon for achievement, for the reflexes of Francis were not so rubbery then as they might be now in Jack’s bathroom. They were full of fiber and acid and cannonade; and before Rowdy Dick, who had drunk too much of the homemade hooch he had bought, unquestionably too cheaply for sanity, earlier in the day, could make restitution for his impetuosity, Francis deflected the cleaver, which was aimed no longer at his feet but at his head, losing in the process two thirds of a right index finger and an estimated one eighth of an inch of flesh from the approximate center of his nose. He bled then in a wild careen, and with diminished hand knocking the cleaver from Rowdy Dick’s grip, he took hold of that same Rowdy Dick by pantleg and armpit and swung him, oh wrathful lambs, against the abutment where the poem was inscribed, swung him as a battering ram might be swung, and cracked Rowdy Dick’s skull from left parietal to the squamous area of the occipital. rendering him bloody, insensible, leaking, and instantly dead.

What Francis recalled of this unmanageable situation was the compulsion to flight, the most familiar notion, after the desire not to aspire, that he had ever entertained. And after searching, as swiftly as he knew how, for his lost digital joints, and after concluding that they had flown too deeply into the dust and the weeds ever to be retrieved again by any hand of any man, and after pausing also, ever so briefly, for a reconnoitering, not of what might be recoverable of the nose but of what might be visually memorable because of its separation into parts, Francis began to run, and in so doing, reconstituted a condition that was as pleasurable to his being as it was natural: the running of bases after the crack of the bat, the running from accusation, the running from the calumny of men and women, the running from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit through ritualistic straightenings, the running, finally, in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit.

He found his way to a freight yard, found there an empty boxcar with open door, and so entered into yet another departure from completion: the true and total story of his life thus far. It was South Bend before he got to a hospital, where the intern asked him: Where’s the finger? And Francis said: In the weeds. And how about the nose? Where’s that piece of the nose? If you’d only brought me that piece of the nose, we might be able to put it back together and you wouldn’t even know it was gone.

All things had ceased to bleed by then, and so Francis was free once again from those deadly forces that so frequently sought to sever the line of his life.

He had stanched the flow of his wound.

He had stood staunchly irresolute in the face of capricious and adverse fate.

He had, oh wondrous man, stanched death its very self.

o o o

Francis dried his face with the towel, buttoned up his shirt, and put on his coat and trousers. He noddçd an apology to Rowdy Dick for having taken his life and included in the nod the hope that Dick would understand it hadn’t been intentional. Rowdy Dick smiled and doffed his cap, creating an eruption of brilliance around his dome. Francis could see the line of Dick’s cranial fracture running through his hair like a gleaming river, and Francis understood that Rowdy Dick was in heaven, or so close to it that he was taking on the properties of an angel of the Lord. Dick put his cap on again and even the cap exuded a glow, like the sun striving to break through a pale, gray cloud. “Yes,” said Francis, “I’m sorry I broke your head so bad, but I hope you remember I had my reasons,” and he held up to Rowdy Dick his truncated finger. “You know, you can’t be a priest when you got a finger missin’. Can’t say mass with a hand like this. Can’t throw a baseball either.” He rubbed the bump in his nose with the stump of a finger. “Kind of a bump there, but what the hell. Doe put a big bandage on it, and it got itchy, so I ripped it off. Went back when it got infected, and the doe says, You shouldn’ta took off that bandage, because now I got to scrape it out and you’ll have an even bigger bump there. I’da had a bump anyway. What the hell, little bump like that don’t look too bad, does it? I ain’t complainin’. I don’t hold no grudges more’n five years.”

“You all right in there, Francis?” Helen called. “Who are you talking to?”

Francis waved to Rowdy Dick, understanding that some debts of violence had been settled, but he remained full of the awareness of rampant martyrdom surrounding him: martyrs to wrath, to booze, to failure, to loss, to hostile weather. Aldo Campione gestured at Francis, suggesting that while there may be some inconsistency about it, prayers were occasionally answerable, a revelation that did very little to improve Francis’s state of mind, for there had never been a time since childhood when he knew what to pray for.

“Hey bum,” he said to Jack when he stepped out of the bathroom, “how about a bum gettin’ a drink?”

“He ain’t no bum,” Clara said.

“Goddamn it, I know he ain’t,” Francis said. “He’s a hell of a man. A workin’ man.”

“How come you shaved?” Helen asked.

“Gettin’ itchy. Four days and them whiskers grow back inside again.”

“It sure improves how you look,” Clara said.

“That’s the truth,” said Jack.

“I knew Francis was handsome,” Clara said, “but this is the first time I ever saw you clean shaved.”

“I was thinkin’ about how many old bums I know died in the weeds. Wake up covered with snow and some of ‘em layin’ there dead as hell, froze stiff. Some get up and walk away from it. I did myself. But them others are gone for good. You ever know a guy named Rowdy Dick Doolan in your travels?”

“Never did,” Jack said.

“There was another guy, Pocono Pete, he died in Denver, froze like a brick. And Poocher Felton, he bought it in Detroit, pissed his pants and froze tight to the sidewalk. And a crazy bird they called Ward Six, no other name. They found him with a red icicle growin’ out of his nose. All them old guys, never had nothin’, never knew nothin’, stupid, thievin’, crazy. Foxy Phil Tooker, a skinny little runt, he froze all scrunched up, knees under his chin. ‘Stead of straightenin’ him out, they buried him in half a coffin. Lorda mercy, them geezers. I bet they all of ‘em, dyin’ like that, I bet they all wind up in heaven, if they ever got such a place.”

“I believe when you’re dead you go in the ground and that’s the end of it,” Jack said. “Heaven never made no sensicality to me whatsoever.”

“You wouldn’t get in anyhow,” Helen said. “They’ve got your reservations someplace else.”

“Then I’m with him,” Clara said. “Who’d want to be in heaven with all them nuns? God what a bore.”

Francis knew Clara less than three weeks, but he could see the curve of her life: sexy kid likes the rewards, goes pro, gets restless, marries and makes kids, chucks that, pro again, sickens, but really sick, gettin’ old, gettin’ ugly, locks onto Jack, turns monster. But she’s got most of her teeth, not bad; and that hair: you get her to a beauty shop and give her a marcel, it’d be all right; put her in new duds, high heels and silk stockin’s; and hey, look at them titties, and that leg: the skin’s clear on it.

Clara saw Francis studying her and gave him a wink. “I knew a fella once, looked a lot like you. I had the hots for him.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Helen said.

“He loved what I gave him.”

“Clara never lacked for boyfriends,” Jack said. “I’m a lucky man. But she’s pretty sick. That’s why you can’t stay. She eats a lot of toast.”

“Oh I could make some toast,” Helen said, standing up from her chair. “Would you like that?”

“If I feel like eatin’ I’ll make my own toast,” Clara said. “And I’m gettin’ ready to go to bed. Make sure you lock the door when you go out.”

Jack grabbed Francis by the arm and pulled him toward the kitchen, but not before Francis readjusted his vision of Clara sitting in the middle of her shit machine, sending up a silent reek from her ruined guts and their sewerage.

o o o

When Jack and Francis came back into the living room Francis was smoking one of Jack’s cigarettes. He dropped it as he reached for the wine, and Helen groaned.

“Everything fallin’ on the floor,” Francis said. “I don’t blame you for throwin’ these bums out if they can’t behave respectable.”

“It’s gettin’ late for me,” Jack said. “I used to get by on two, three hours’ sleep, but no more.”

“I ain’t stayed here in how long now?” Francis asked. “Two weeks, ain’t it?”

“Oh come on, Francis,” Clara said. “You were here not four days ago. And Helen last night. And last Sunday you were here.”

“Sunday we left,” Helen said.

“I flopped here two nights, wasn’t it?” Francis said.

“Six,” Jack said. “Like a week.”

“I beg to differ with you,” Helen said.

“It was over a week,” Jack said.

“I know different,” said Helen.

“From Monday to Sunday.”

“Oh no.”

“It’s a little mixed up,” Francis said.

“He’s got a lot of things mixed up,” Helen said. “I hope you don’t get your food mixed up like that down at the diner.”

“No,” Jack said.

“You know, you’re very insultin’,” Francis said to Helen.

“It was a week,” Jack said.

“You’re a liar,” Helen said.

“Don’t call me a liar because I know so.”

“Haven’t you got any brains at all?” Francis said. “You supposed to be a college woman, you supposed to be this and that.”

“I am a college woman.”

“You know what I thought,” Jack said, “was for you to stay here, Franny, till you get work, till you pick up a little bankroll. You don’t have to give me nothin’.”

“Shake hands on it,” Helen said.

“I don’t know about the proposition now,” Jack said.

“Because I’m a bum,” Francis said.

“No, I wouldn’t put it that way.” Jack poured more wine for Francis.

“I knew he didn’t mean it,” Helen said.

“I’m gonna tell you,” Francis said. “I always thought a lot of Clara.”

“You’re drunk, Francis,” Helen screamed, standing up again. “Stay drunk for the rest of your life. I’m leaving you, Francis. You’re crazy. All you want is to guzzle wine. You’re insane!”

“What’d I say?” Francis asked. “I said I liked Clara.”

“Nothin’ wrong about that,” Jack said.

“I don’t mind about that,” Helen said, sitting down.

“I don’t know what to do with that woman,” Francis said.

“Do you even know if you’re staying here tonight?” Helen asked.

“No, he’s not,” Jack said. “Take him with you when you go.”

“We’re going,” Helen said.

“Clara’s too sick, Francis,” said Jack.

Francis sipped his wine, put it on the table, and struck a tap dancer’s pose.

“How you like these new duds of mine, Clara? You didn’t tell me how swell I look, all dressed up.”

“You look sharp,” Clara said.

“You can’t keep up with Francis.”

“Don’t waste your time, Francis,” Helen said.

“You’re getting very hostile, you know that? Listen, you want to sleep with me in the weeds tonight?”

“I never slept in the weeds,” Helen said.

“Never?” asked Clara.

“No, never,” said Helen.

“Oh yes,” Francis said. “She slept in the coaches with me, and the fields.”

“Never. You made that up, Francis.”

“We been through the valley together,” Francis said.

“Maybe you have,” said Helen. “I’ve never gone that far down and I don’t intend to go that far down.”

“It ain’t far to go. She slept in Finny’s car night before last.”

“That’s the last time. If it came to that, I’d get in touch with my people.”

“You really ought to get in touch with them, dearie,” said Clara.

“My people are very high class. My brother is a very well-to-do lawyer but I don’t like to ask him for anything.”

“Sometimes you have to,” Jack said. “You oughta move in with him.”

“Then Francis’d be out. No, I’ve got Francis. We’d get married tomorrow if only he could get a divorce, wouldn’t we, Fran.”

“That’s right, honey.”

“We battle sometimes, but only when he drinks. Then he goes haywire.”

“You oughta get straight, Franny.” Jack said. “You could have twenty bucks in your pocket at all times. They need men like you. You could have everything you want. A new Victrola like that one right there. That’s a honey.”

“I had all that shit,” Francis said.

“It’s late,” Clara said.

“Yeah, people,” said Jack. “Gotta hit the hay.”

“Fix me a sandwich, will ya?” Francis asked. “To take out.”

“No,” Clara said.

Helen rose, screaming, and started for Clara. “You forget when you were hungry.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Francis said.

“I won’t shut up. I remember when she came to my place years ago, begging for food. I know her a long time. I’m honest in what I know.”

“I never begged,” said Clara.

“He only asked for a sandwich,” said Helen.

“I’m gonna give him a sandwich,” Jack said.

“Jack don’t want you to come back again,” Francis said to Helen.

“I don’t want to ever come back again,” Helen said.

“He asked for a sandwich,” Jack said, “I’ll give him a sandwich.”

“I knew you would,” Francis told him.

“Damn right I’ll give you a sandwich.”

“Damn right,” Francis said, “and I knew it.”

“I don’t want to be bothered,” Clara said.

“Sharp cheese. You like sharp cheese?”

“My favorite,” Francis said.

Jack went to the kitchen and came back into a silent room with a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. Francis took it and put it in his coat. Helen stood in the doorway.

“Good night, pal,” Francis said to Jack.

“Best of luck,” Jack said.

“See you around,” Francis said to Clara.

“Toodle-oo,” said Clara.

o o o

On the street, Francis felt the urge to run. Ten Broeck Street, in the direction they were walking, inclined downward toward Clinton Avenue, and he felt the gravitational fall driving him into a trot that would leave her behind to solve her own needs. The night seemed colder than before, and clearer too, the moon higher in its sterile solitude. North Pearl Street was deserted, no cars, no people at this hour, one-forty-five by the great clock on the First Church. They had walked three blocks without speaking and now they were heading back toward where they had begun, toward the South End, the mission, the weeds.

“Where the hell you gonna sleep now?” Francis asked.

“I can’t be sure, but I wouldn’t stay there if they gave me silk sheets and mink pillows. I remember her when she was whoring and always broke. Now she’s so high and mighty. I had to speak my piece.”

“You didn’t accomplish anything.”

“Did Jack really say that they don’t want me anymore?”

“Right. But they asked me to stay. Clara thinks you’re a temptation to Jack. The way I figure, if I give her some attention she won’t worry about you, but you’re so goddamn boisterous. Here. Have a piece of sandwich.”

“It’d choke me.”

“It won’t choke you. You’ll be glad for it.”

“I’m not a phony.”

“I’m not a phony either.”

“You’re not, eh?”

“You know what I’ll do?” He grabbed her collar and her throat and screamed into her eyes. “I’ll knock you right across that goddamn street! You don’t bullshit me one time. Be a goddamn woman! That’s the reason you can’t flop with nobody. I can go up there right now and sleep. Jack said I could stay.”

“He did not.”

“He certainly did. But they don’t want you. I asked for a sandwich. Did I get it?”

“You’re really stupendous and colossal.”

“Listen”--and he still held her by the collar-”you squint your eyes at me and I’ll knock you over that goddamn automobile. You been a pain in the ass to me for nine years. They don’t want you because you’re a pain in the ass.”

Headlights moved north on Pearl Street, coming toward them, and Francis let go of her; She did not move, but stared at him.

“You got some goddamn eyes, you know?” He was screaming. “I’ll black ‘em for you. You’re a horse’s ass! You know what I’ll do? I’ll rip that fuckin’ coat off and put you in rags.”

She did not move her body or her eyes.

“I’m gonna eat this sandwich. Whole hunk of cheese.”

“I don’t want it.”

“By god I do. I’ll be hungry tomorrow. It won’t choke me. I’m thankful for everything.”

“You’re a perfect saint.”

“Listen. Straighten up or I’m gonna kill you.”

“I won’t eat it. It’s rat food.”

“I’m gonna kill you!” Francis screamed. “Goddamn it, you hear what I said? Don’t drive me insane. Be a goddamn woman and go the fuck to bed somewhere.”

They walked, not quite together, toward Madison Avenue, south again on South Pearl, retracing their steps. Francis brushed Helen’s arm and she moved away from him.

“You gonna stay at the mission with Pee Wee?”

“No.”

“Then you gonna stay with me?”

“I’m going to call my brother.”

“Good. Call him. Call him a couple of times.”

“I’ll have him meet me someplace.”

“Where you gonna get the nickel to make the call?”

“That’s my business. God, Francis, you were all right till you started on the wine. Wine, wine, wine.”

“I’ll get some cardboard. We’ll go to that old building.”

“The police keep raiding that place. I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t know why you didn’t stay with Jack and Clara since you were so welcome.”

“You’re a woman for abuse.”

They walked east on Madison, past the mission. Helen did not look in. When they reached Green Street she stopped.

“I’m going down below.” she said.

“Who you kiddin’?” Francis said. “You got noplace to go. you’ll he knocked on the head.”

“That wouldn’t he the worst ever happened to me.”

“We got to find something. Can’t leave a dog out like this.”

“Shows you what kind of people they are up there.”

“Stay with me.’’

“No, Francis. You’re crazy.”

He grabbed the hair at the hack of her head, then held her whole head in both hands.

“You’re gonna hit me,” she said.

“I wont hit ya, babe. I love ya some. Are ya awful cold?”

“I don’t think I’ve been warm once in two days.’’

Francis let go of her and took off his suitcoat and put it around her shoulders.

“No. it’s too cold for you to do that,” she said. “I’ve got this coat. You can’t he in just a shirt.’’

“What the hell’s the difference. Coat ain’t no protect ion.”

She handed him hack the coat. “I’m going.” she said.

“Don’t walk away from me.” Francis said. “You’ll he lost in the world.”

But she walked away. And Francis leaned against the light pole on the corner, lit the cigarette Jack had given him, fingered the dollar bill Jack had slipped him in the kitchen, ate what was left of the cheese sandwich, and then threw his old undershorts down the sewer.

o o o

Helen walked down Green Street to a vacant lot, where she saw a fire in an oil drum. From across the street she could see five coloreds around the fire, men and women. On an old sofa in the weeds just beyond the drum, she saw a white woman lying underneath a colored man. She walked back to where Francis waited.

“I couldn’t stay outside tonight,” she said. “I’d die.”

Francis nodded and they walked to Finny’s car, a 1930 black Oldsmobile, dead and wheelless in an alley off John Street. Two men were asleep in it, Finny in the front passenger seat.

“I don’t know that man in back,” Helen said.

“Yeah you do,” said Francis. “That’s Little Red from the mission. He won’t bother you. If he does I’ll pull out his tongue.”

“I don’t want to get in there, Francis.”

“It’s warm, anyhow. Cold in them weeds, honey, awful cold. You walk the streets alone, they’ll pinch you quicker’n hell.”

“You get in the back.”

“No. No room in there for the likes of me. Legs’re too long.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll find me some of them tall weeds, get outa the wind.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Sure, I’ll be back. You get a good sleep and I’ll see you here or up at the mission in the ayem.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

“You got to, babe. It’s what there is.”

Francis opened the passenger door and shook Finny.

“Hey bum. Move over. You got a visitor.”

Finny opened his eyes, heavy with wine. Little Red was snoring.

“Who the hell are you?” Finny said.

“It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in.”

“Francis.” Finny raised his head.

“I’ll get you a jug tomorrow for this, old buddy,” Francis said. “She’s gotta get in outa this weather.”

“Yeah,” said Finny.

“Never mind yeah, just move your ass over and let her sit. She can’t sleep behind that wheel, condition her stomach’s in.”

“Unnngghh,” said Finny, and he slid behind the wheel.

Helen sat on the front seat, dangling her legs out of the car. Francis stroked her cheek with three fingertips and then let his hand fall. She lifted her legs inside.

“You don’t have to be scared,” Francis said.

“I’m not scared,” Helen said. “Not that.”

“Finny won’t let nothin’ happen to you. I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he does.”

“She knows,” Finny said. “She’s been here before.”

“Sure,” said Francis. “Nothing can happen to you.”

“No.”

“See you in the mornin’.”

“Sure.”

“Keep the faith,” Francis said.

And he closed the car door.

o o o

He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more. Because he needed to confront the ragman in the morning, he would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?

He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square, where as a child he’d boarded the riverboats for outings to Troy, or Kingston, or picnics on Lagoon Island. He passed the D amp; H building and Billy Barnes’s Albany Evening Journal, a building his simpleminded brother Tommy had helped build in 1913. He walked up to Maiden Lane and Broadway, where Keeler’s Hotel used to be, and where his brother Peter sometimes spent the night when he was on the outs with Mama. But Keeler’s burned the year after Francis ran away and now it was a bunch of stores. Francis had rowed down Broadway to the hotel, Billy in the rowboat with him, in 1913 when the river rose away the hell and gone up and flooded half of downtown. The kid loved it. Said he liked it better’n sleigh ridin’. Gone. What the hell ain’t gone? Well, me. Yeah, me. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of me left, but I ain’t gone entirely. Be goddiddley-damned if I’m gonna roll over and die.

Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.

He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin’s barn, still standing. Who’d believe it? Could Welt the Tin be livin’? Not likely. Too dumb to live so long. Was it in use? Still a barn? Looks like a barn. But who keeps horses now?

The barn was a shell, with a vast hole in the far end of the roof where moonlight poured cold fire onto the ancient splintered floor. Bats flew in balletic arcs around the streetlamp outside, the last lamp on North Street; and the ghosts of mules and horses snorted and stomped for Francis. He scuffed at the floorboards himself and found them solid. He touched them and found them dry. One barn door canted on one hinge, and Francis calculated that if he could move the door a few feet to sleep in its lee, he would be protected from the wind on three sides. No moonlight leaked through the roof above this corner, the same corner where Welt the Tin had hung his rakes and pitchforks, all in a row between spaced nails.

Francis would reclaim this corner, restore all rakes and pitchforks, return for the night the face of Welt the Tin as it had been, reinvest himself with serendipitous memories of a lost age. On a far shelf in the moonlight he saw a pile of papers and a cardboard box. He spread the papers in his chosen corner, ripped the box at its seams, and lay down on the flattened pile.

He had lived not seventy-five feet from where he now lay.

Seventy-five feet from this spot, Gerald Phelan died on the 26th of April, 1916.

In Finny’s car Helen would probably be pulling off Finny, or taking him in her mouth. Finny would be unequal to intercourse, and Helen would be too fat for a toss in the front seat. Helen would be equal to any such task. He knew, though she had never told him, that she once had to fuck two strangers to be able to sleep in peace. Francis accepted this cuckoldry as readily as he accepted the onus of pulling the blanket off Clara and penetrating whatever dimensions of reek necessary to gain access to a bed. Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?

Maybe I won’t survive tonight after all, Francis thought as he folded his hands between his thighs. He drew his knees up toward his chest, not quite so high as Foxy Phil Tooker’s, and considered the death he had caused in this life, and was perhaps causing still. Helen is dying and Francis is perhaps the principal agent of hastening her death, even as his whole being tonight has been directed to keeping her from freezing in the dust like Sandra. I don’t want to die before you do, Helen, is what Francis thought. You’ll be like a little kid in the world without me.

He thought of his father flying through the air and knew the old man was in heaven. The good leave us behind to think about the deeds they did. His mother would be in purgatory, probably for goddamn ever. She wasn’t evil enough for hell, shrew of shrews that she was, denier of life. But he couldn’t see her ever getting a foot into heaven either, if they ever got such a place.

The new and frigid air of November lay on Francis like a blanket of glass. Its weight rendered him motionless and brought peace to his body, and the stillness brought a cessation of anguish to his brain. In a dream he was only just beginning to enter, horns and mountains rose up out of the earth, the horns-ethereal, trumpets-sounding with a virtuosity equal to the perilousness of the crags and cornices of the mountainous pathways. Francis recognized the song the trumpets played and he floated with its melody. Then, yielding not without trepidation to its coded urgency, he ascended bodily into the exalted reaches of the world where the song had been composed so long ago. And he slept.