Second Ending

16

“Reen is dead, isn’t he?” Andy asked.

He sat up in bed, and those were the first words he spoke, as if the knowledge had eluded him while talking yesterday and then rested on his unconscious all night long; as if his long reminiscence had touched on the truth, ignored it, stored it, and was only now reluctantly exposing it to the light of a new day.

“Yes,” Bud said, “he’s dead. A German bullet in the town of St. Vith.”

“To the biggest and the best, from the Boys,” Andy said.

“Yes,” Bud answered. He had been up for a half hour already, silently washing and dressing while Andy slept. This was Tuesday morning, and his test was at nine, and he couldn’t afford to be late, not after the pitiful amount of studying he’d done. He’d never been afraid of an examination in his life, but he was truly frightened this morning, knowing he was unprepared and blaming Andy for his lack of preparation.

Yesterday, while Andy had talked and talked endlessly, Bud had repeatedly asked himself, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and each time the answer had been a crashing No! and each time he had allowed himself to be caught in the sticky web of Andy’s memory, being drawn back over the years in spite of himself. He had not wanted to become a part of it. The past was dead, as dead as Reen. It had no place in the present scheme of things. Andy had no place in that scheme either, and he’d been a fool to take him in. He should have—

“I forget things sometimes,” Andy said. “Like Reen.”

“You’d never know it,” Bud answered, somewhat caustically.

“Like his being dead,” Andy went on, unperturbed. “I can’t get used to the idea that he’s dead.”

“He’s been dead for a long time,” Bud said.

Andy nodded. “Him and me both.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Andy said. He seemed suddenly angry. “Nothing at all.”

“Well, I’ve got to get out of here.” Bud glanced at his watch. “The exam is at nine, and I don’t want to be late — even though I’ll flunk the damned thing, anyway.”

“You’ll pass it,” Andy said disinterestedly.

“Yeah,” Bud said. He looked at his watch again. “Where’s Carol? She said she was coming over this morning, and here it is—”

“Why’s she coming over?”

“Because she wants to, I guess.”

“Relieving the watch, huh?”

“She wants to see you,” Bud said.

“Sure, she wants to see me. She wants to guard the prisoner, you mean.”

“Look, Andy—”

“Did I say I’m blaming either of you? Well, I’m not. You probably both think I’m a lot of hot air, and maybe you’re right. But I know in my heart that this time it’s for good. I may be mixed up, but I’m not stupid.”

“No one said you were.”

“I’m not stupid, and I know this particular treadmill leads nowhere, man, nowhere. So I’m getting off it, and damned fast. I don’t need Carol or you to watch me.”

“Nobody’s watching you, Andy.”

“No, nobody,” he said, and again there was the hurt anger in his voice. “You’d better go. You don’t want to miss that exam, do you?”

“No, I sure as hell don’t. Tell Carol I waited as long as I could, will you?”

“Sure. And don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Bud nodded. “Listen, if you want any breakfast, all the stuff is in the refrigerator — milk, eggs, butter, anything you might need. There’s bread in the breadbox, and there’s instant coffee and Corn Flakes in the cabinet over the stove. Just help yourself.”

“The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” Andy cracked.

Bud ignored him. “Carol should be here soon,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I won’t leave my cell.”

“Now look, Andy—”

“Is it all right to play some records?”

“Anything you like.”

“Thanks. I appreciate all you’re doing, Bud.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“You’re an honorable man,” Andy said, and again there was this controlled anger in his voice. “Doing all this for old-times’ sake. Real honorable.”

“It has nothing to do with honor,” Bud answered, beginning to get a little irritated himself.

“Maybe not. I guess you’re the type who’d take in any stray dog in a storm, huh?”

“Any dog,” Bud said nastily, finally fed up.

“I figured, man. Go take your test.”

“I’ll see you later,” Bud said. He took a sports jacket from the closet, slipped into it, and then went to the door. “Now take it easy.”

“Sure,” Andy said.

Bud walked out into the hallway and then down the steps. He could not understand Andy’s attitude, and his lack of understanding annoyed him fully as much as the attitude did. He had, after all, taken in what amounted to a complete stranger. He had not expected bootlicking gratitude, but he had expected civility. Andy had apparently awakened this morning with a long hair across, a distrust for everyone and everything, and a resentment toward anyone who was trying to help him.

Well, the hell with Andy.

If he wanted to be the misunderstood martyr of some misunderstood cause, that was Andy’s prerogative. He seemed to hold a misbegotten concept about drugs, anyway, a concept that was hardly linked with the repentance he professed. Whenever he talked about narcotics his eyes glowed and he talked with the rapid fervor of a new father — despite his religious resolve to shed the habit. It was as if he constantly had to reassure himself that what he’d done was not really so bad at all, in spite of the fact that he recognized its badness at the same time. And so, facing this double-headed ogre of repentance and self-justification, he was forced to acknowledge aid gratefully, while simultaneously denying that he needed any aid.

Bud could understand why Andy resented anyone’s watching him. If he was earnest in his desire to break the habit, there was only one person who could help him, and that was himself. But the people who were watching him — and Bud had unfortunately become one of those people — served as consciences more than jailers. They were only interested in seeing that Andy stuck to his resolve.

Or at least they had been interested.

Bud could not speak for Carol, but he certainly knew that he himself no longer cared whether Andy abstained or went right back to the needle. He had never enjoyed the web of circumstance, feeling thwarted and frustrated in its entangling power. Andy had gone out of his life a long time ago, and he did not want him back in it now, and he cursed himself for not having taken a firmer stand the moment Carol called. He had reacted weakly, and he deserved everything he got now, but he still had himself to think about.

He had not imagined the sneering quality in Andy’s voice whenever the impending examination was discussed. He had felt foolish about it in the beginning, until he realized that time was passing rapidly, until he began to suspect Andy of deliberately keeping him away from his studies.

He was certain now that he would fail the examination. There was no doubt in his mind that he would fail it. And the next test was tomorrow. Good God, tomorrow afternoon. If only he had more time, if only the tests were bunched together at the beginning of next week, but no, there was another tomorrow afternoon, and another after that on Friday morning, and he’d be facing those with the knowledge that he’d flunked the first one. If he flunked. Of course he would flunk! He obviously could not study with Andy around. He could tell Andy to shut the hell up, of course, but Andy seemed to be a bottomless cup of memories that never ceased flowing. Andy persisted in going back to the past, and — worse — he had been trapped again and again into going back with him, a sort of helpless prisoner enmeshed in the bowels of a persistent time machine.

Well, the time machine had certainly put the old kibosh on the Milton exam. He discounted that as a definite loss, fired with the knowledge that he somehow had to pass the other exams. Once that was done he would try to wheedle a passing grade for the course from Dr. Mason, and, knowing that old bitch, the task would not be a simple one. But if she were faced with the fact that only her course stood between him and graduation in three and a half, perhaps she would suffer a momentary softening of the heart, the head, and the arteries.

Sourly he contemplated the sickening apple-polishing that lay ahead of him, and the thought nauseated him.

He blamed Andy, but most of all he blamed himself. He had not been cut out for the role of thankless benefactor. He had once been that type of beautific soul who could do a good deed and then silently allow the deed to pass unpraised. But not any more. Oh, sure, Carol would pat him on the head once this was all over and tell him how wonderfully he’d behaved, but he’d long ago stopped seeking praise from anyone.

The big obstacle ahead, for the moment, was the Milton test. And maybe it wasn’t a very big obstacle to Andy’s way of thinking, and maybe it was a very childish thing to be worrying about, but it was nonetheless an enormous obstacle — and facing this obstacle, and realizing he could not surmount it, he felt again this surly despair, this self-condemnation for having so easily been led into the slaughterhouse of Andy’s trouble.

Disgustedly he walked to the subway kiosk and boarded an uptown train.

Now that he was alone in the apartment he felt a little better.

He knew he shouldn’t have snapped at Bud that way, but there were times when the all-seeing eye of Big Brother annoyed the hell out of him. Everyone seemed to be watching, every second of the day. It was like being a two-headed calf in a side show. The people came to watch you, and they watched you carefully, to see what two-headed things did. When you became an addict, you also became a two-headed thing. And maybe one of those heads understood the watching eyes, but the other head resented them immensely.

He’d also been a little sickened by Bud’s behavior. All right, he was a big-shot college boy now, but don’t college boys ever realize that some things in life don’t jell according to the textbook? He had an examination, and that’s all well and good, but he’d acted as if the examination were the Gabriel horn blowing, as if the floods and the fires were going to rain down on his goddamned head if he flunked.

That was the trouble with college boys — everything according to the book. Ants with tweed jackets and pipes.

A college boy studies Economics, and he thinks he knows the secret of a dollar. He gets sixty-five bucks a month from the government, and he studies Economics, and, man, he knows what it’s all about, he knows all about getting out there and earning a buck.

Or he studies American History, and he plots a cycle, and he can interpret everything that’s happening right here and now. Did a fruit get rolled and mugged up on Fiftieth and Broadway last night? Why, man, that’s simple to calculate. We can draw a parallel between this and the Boston Tea Party. How many lumps, please?

He takes a course in Biology, and he knows all about sex then. He knows how the lowly snail does it, and he knows how the tsetse fly does it, but does he ever once realize there’s a vas deferens between the dusty, dry pages of his textbook and a session in bed with a passionate wench? No, not the college boy.

The college boy lives in another world, a world in which he busily sniffs the seats of girls’ bicycles — and Bud was in that world now. And it was a damn shame, because there had once been something between Bud and him, and now that something was dead and gone, and it always pained him to realize that something was dead. All the good things in his life seemed to die sooner or later, mostly sooner, and sometimes he felt that he was outliving his experiences, that he’d seen everything there was to see and done everything there was to do, and now they were all dead, and here he was a living man in a world of dead dreams, an old old man at twenty.

Twenty, was that all?

Not even old enough to vote.

Fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen, those were the years. Those were the real years, all of them, and he and Bud had shared a good friendship then, all right, one of the best, and what’s happened to it now? How do friendships become non-friendships? The College Boy and the Addict, a play in three acts discussing the rise and fall of a friendship.

“George, I’d like you to meet my non-friend Bud, who is good enough to allow me the freedom of his four walls, twelve walls if you count the kitchen and the toilet. Best little non-friend I ever had. Shake hands, non-buddy.”

Oh, sure, you can joke about it. My mother always said there was no such thing as a true friend, anyway. “Never tell anyone your business,” she used to say, as if she were Barbara Hutton sitting on the Woolworth fortune. Man, why are small people full of such big ideas? But Bud and I were really friends, really and truly, and you shouldn’t joke about a good friendship, even though he’s a college boy now, because when you joke about a good friendship that’s now dead, it’s the same as joking about a good man who’s dead.

The apartment was very silent.

He could never stand the loneliness of silence. He never felt lonely when he was sitting in the center of a band, and he never felt lonely when he was high, either. We mustn’t think about getting high, must we, now must we? No, that’s all behind us, like the dead friendship between Bud and me. The friendship became a non-friendship, and now the addict is about to become a non-addict. If he could stick to it. Oh, he could stick to it, certainly he could stick to it. Was it any harder than busting double C? Well, to tell the truth, yes, it was a good deal harder, if you want to know.

There was only one real requisite for becoming a non-addict; you had to became an addict first.

What had his father called it? A dope fiend, yes.

A perfect word portrait, economical and precise. The picture of a man with his eyes feverish in his head, his lips dripping saliva, his teeth glinting, holding a needle full of (dum-dee-dum-dum)

That’s a dope fiend.

You use dope when you’re building model airplanes, too, so, using a college boy’s reasoning, we can assume that all kids who build model airplanes are dope fiends, dope.

Which reminds me a little of a tired gag I wrote back in 1492.

Morris Cohen, an intelligent little boy, says to his father upon hearing the Good Humor wagon outside, “I want an ice cream pop.”

Meyer Cohen, a man against modern development of any sort, including these newfangled ice creams on sticks, answers, “You’ll get an ice-cream cone.”

Whereupon: “You don’t understand. I want an ice-cream pop, Pop.”

Whereupon: “I understand. You’ll get an ice-cream cone, Cohen.”

Ah, the intricacies of the English language. Put that in your briar pipe and smoke it, Buddy-College-Boy.

You put opium in a pipe to smoke, you know. It’s a very gummy thing, and you ball it between your fingers and stuff it into the bowl of a pipe, and blooie, amigo, there goes your skull!

Well, not quite blooie. Blooie is for the comic books.

More like shhhhhhhlooie. A sort of sliding down, or up, but sliding anyway, just sliding away from all the petty garbage and into another world, like the world my non-friend Bud inhabits. Ah, that time on opium had been the end, but it’s really very dangerous stuff, opium, really very dangerous, so it’s better I steered away from that junk, but still it was the end, the laziest kind of high ever, not a slam like H, but that lazy, lazy, mother-loving... m-m-m, sweet.

Bud would never understand that world in a million years. No, Bud would never dig it. Nor I. Or me. Or whatever.

I don’t dig it any more either. Take that sixteenth of heroin in the coat pocket of my jacket, and take the syringe and spoon in the inside pocket of that same jacket, and take a book of matches to cook the junk with — take all that, pal, and welcome to it because I’m off that kick, dad.

And I don’t feel too bad this morning either. No breakfast, and maybe that’s the reason. Hell, you can’t throw up something you haven’t had yet. But nonetheless, and even so, I feel pretty good. Which just shows to go you can’t keep a good man down, even if you stick him in a prison and appoint a couple of dedicated jailers to guard him.

I need jailers like I need a hole in the head. Don’t they realize I’m off it for good this time? Can’t they see that I mean it this time? They must be blind if they can’t see that. What do I have to do to show them?

Damnit, that’s what burns my butt. Not a little knee-high fire, but that, just that. They should be able to see that I’m sincere this time. Didn’t I pass a fix by yesterday? Wasn’t I all set to shoot up, and didn’t I say no thanks, thanks a lot, but no thanks? Didn’t I have that needle all set, just, just... now don’t start thinking about needles and fixes because that doesn’t help the situation one bit. But still, it burns me up that they don’t trust me. If they don’t trust me, who the hell is going to trust me, when I can’t even trust myself, when I...

I can trust myself.

I’m all alone here. Where the hell is Carol? And there’s junk and the works in the closet across the room. How many steps to that outfit? Three, four, five? But I’m not making a move for it, am I? So doesn’t that prove I can trust myself? What the hell else does it prove? I’m not crippled, and I can get up any time I want to and walk right over to that closet, and how long does it take to ram a needle into my arm. Now get off that kick, Dick, because that’s the suicide kick. You’ve got the goddamn thing under control, so don’t think about the closet, or the jacket, or what’s in the jacket pockets. Screw that noise, boys.

Now just simmer down. That’s the biggest enemy, thinking about it. When Helen was kicking the habit, she wouldn’t even think about it. She wouldn’t let me come near her with the stuff, and she wouldn’t allow her mind to come anywhere near it either. So let’s forget whatever the hell is in that closet. There I’ve forgotten it already, I don’t even know what’s in that closet, let’s just forget it and think of something else.

There must be a lot of things to think about, so what shall we think about on this bright sunny morning?

Now there’s a bright sunny morning, so that should give us a bright sunny idea. And there it is: a bright sunny idea. Bottle it, cork it, and paint it green. And then march with it in the Saint Patty’s Day parade.

The trouble with Saint Patrick, in case anyone is interested, is that he drove the snakes out of Ireland, and all the bastards came here and became traffic cops.

Now we’re doing it. Now we’re beginning to think of other things. This is what the cartoonists call “snowballing.”

Cops, was it? All right, cops, why not cops? Of course, the cops and I are old friends, so we mustn’t speak of the cops disrespectfully. We’re even better old non-friends than Buddy and me — don’t you remember all the times with the cops, oh, you remember, surely you remember? Yes, I remember but we’re not supposed to think about things like... but this wouldn’t be thinking about things like that, this would be thinking about cops, like the time on the roof, don’t you remember, don’t you remember the time on the roof, don’t you remember every single line of that dialogue? Oh, Christ, you were pretty damn sharp that day, and you hadn’t even been fixed, don’t you remember that day?

It was very hot up there on the roof. The sun was just a hazy ball of yellow in the sky, and it shone down on the slick tar of the roof, and it glanced off the skylight and reflected from the badges on the chests of the two cops.

The second cop was leaning over the brick wall on the edge of the roof and looking down into the courtyard. He had a very fat backside, and the blue of his uniform stretched tight over his wide, abundant buttocks. The first cop was fat, too, but not so much as the second one was. He held my elbow in one beefy paw, and then he said, “All right, cokie, what’d you do with it?”

“What’d I do with what?” I asked.

“The syringe and the package. We know you had it, pal. You dump it over the roof there?”

“I don’t know what you mean by a syringe,” I said. “You use a syringe for enemas, don’t you?”

The second cop came back and said, “He’s a wise guy, Tommy. He’s one of the wise-guy type.”

Tommy nodded and clenched his fists. “You just keep on being wise,” he told me. “You just keep doing that. We know you’re on it, son, and all we got to do is catch you. You get booked for possession then.”

“Possession of what?” I asked.

“I told you,” the second cop said. “He’s just a wise guy.”

“You high now?” Tommy asked, studying me shrewdly.

“I don’t know what you mean by high.”

“He don’t know what we mean by high,” the second cop mimicked.

“You guys come around talking about syringes and highs, and I’m just in the dark here. Don’t they teach you guys to speak any English at all?” I said.

“They speak English downtown,” Tommy said. “You’ll find out the first time we cop you with a package of H.”

“What’s H?” I asked.

“Come on, we’re wasting our time,” the second cop said. “He dumped the junk and the works.”

“Man, you guys sure do talk foreign,” I said.

Tommy shook his head sadly. “You don’t know the road you’re on, kid. It’s a shame.”

“Yeah, I bleed for him,” the second cop said.

“I’m bleeding, too,” I told them. “From that goddamn sun.”

“Keep your nose clean, cokie,” Tommy said. “Remember, we catch you with a bindle, and you’ll go cold turkey behind bars.”

“Don’t snow me, dad,” I said. “I know the law better than you do.”

“What?”

“For intent to sell, I’ve got to be holding two or more ounces of H, M, or C. Sixteen ounces on the other junk. For a possession felony, I’ve got to be holding a quarter ounce or more of the big three, or two ounces or more of the other—”

“It’s a misdemeanor to be holding any quantity of narcotics,” the first cop said.

“Spitting on the sidewalk’s a misdemeanor, too,” I said.

“You punks think—”

“Did you find any H, dad?” I asked. “You got anything to pin on me? It s no crime to be a drug addict, you know. So why don’t you go blow your whistle at traffic a little?”

“You goddamned addicts—” he started.

“What’s an addict?” I asked innocently.

The second cop said, “Argh,” and drew back his hand like he was going to slap me across the face. Tommy grabbed him and said, “Come on, let the bastard stew in his own juice.”

I did just that, man.

As soon as they were gone I cut out for the roof top across the way, and then I headed back for my pad. Helen was there that afternoon, and, — oh, did her face light up. She was still on the junk then, and it was a pleasure to see that face light up the way it did because she’d been real low when she’d called and I’d told her to come on over. That was the day I had to swipe a jacket from Gimbel’s — was it Gimbel’s or Macy’s? — but I got away with it clean, stashed under the old overcoat I was wearing. You’d think those stupid bastards would wonder about a guy wearing an overcoat when it was so hot outside. I ditched the coat back at the apartment, and Helen told me to hurry and get the stuff, and then I hocked the jacket and copped from Rog, real good stuff it was, too, Rog never laid a bad bindle on me ever. And if it hadn’t been for the cops, we’d have both been stoned an hour earlier, but it was a good thing they chased me up on the roof at least because that way I could ditch the deck.

Which apartment was that, anyway? Man, how many pads did I fall into after I left the Jerralds band and came back to New York? Dozens, at least. First the place on the Street, and then the one on Third Avenue, and then down in the Village, and then that place one of Helen’s friends got for me for the summer — that was in 1948, wasn’t it? — sure, sure, and then that long string of places I lived in, when everything else was gone and when I had to duck out each month before the rent was due and even that was kicks in a way, fooling all the goddamn happy ants who work for bread by giving you a roof, and what about the hotels, Jesus, all the one-night stands in shoddy hotels, more hotels than you can count on your fingers and toes. New York City has some of the sleaziest hotels in the world if you know where to look for them, and I knew where to look because I had to know where to look. What about that place on Forty-seventh — Forty-eighth was it — that night Helen and I were on the town and we latched onto that guy from Texas who talked about his oil wells and his Caddy. You had to hand it to Helen, she could look like a million bucks whenever she had to, even when she was low, except when she was real sick with it. She wasn’t sick that night, though.

We’d popped off just about a half hour before, both of us at her place, and then Mr. Millionaire landed in our laps, and did Helen turn it on then, all the wattage, nine thousand volts of sparkling electricity because she wanted what Dallas had in his wallet, folded so neatly, and, man, she got it all right. When Helen wants something it’s pretty damned tough to keep her from getting it. We got enough bread that night to keep us in the white stuff for two weeks. I told her she was wasting her time. I told her she should buy into one of these Park Avenue syndicates and make herself a fortune, if she could get that much from only pretending she was going all the way. She damn near scratched my eyes out that night, funny kid Helen, as if she were in a dream world, even though she knew what she was doing always. Still, it was as if she didn’t want to know what she was doing, didn’t want to be reminded of it. Like she was almost taking a revenge on herself or something, doing everything she had to do, and getting so goddamned hooked it wasn’t funny.

And every time I’d say I wasn’t hooked she’d laugh that mocking laugh of hers and tell me I was hooked clear through the bag and back again. A lot she knew about it, hell, I wasn’t hooked at the time, few caps a day, well maybe half a dozen, that’s hooked? I seen guys with habits as long as John Silver, when you’ve got a habit that long, then you’re in trouble, man. Try kicking a habit like that, and you wind up in the booby hatch picking at the coverlet. Me, I just enjoyed the stuff, that’s all. Some guys pick their noses, and that’s a habit; me, I favored drugs — so what’s so bad about either? So long as you got control there’s nothing to worry about, and who can say it isn’t the biggest boot alive? Who can say it doesn’t knock your brains out — well, did, anyway, not any more now, of course, because now I’m off it, which is the only way to be, naturally. But how would you know that was the only way unless you tried the other way? And trying it was the end, trying it was really the mother-loving end, because when you want that stuff, and then when you get it and just...

Now how’d we get back to this again, huh? I thought we were going to steer away from this, and here we are right back to it, with a taste of it in the mouth. Now spit out that taste, spit it out. How many days has it been since I’ve had a fix?

How many hours, how many minutes?

Seconds?

Thanks, I haven’t even had firsts yet.

That’s the way! Oh, Jesus, are we sharp this morning. This morning we don’t need anything to keep this trigger brain clicking. Not heroin, and not anything, why the hell don’t I just go across to that closet and dump that jive in the garbage and forget all about redeeming Buddy’s bag?

Nope. Got to redeem that bag. A promise is a promise, isn’t it? Who hocked the bag? We did. So who redeems it? We do.

Who do?

We do.

Man, this is the end. I’ve never felt this sharp since... since the morning I cut my razor while shaving.

Oh, dig that one! Oh, daddy-oh, beware! Beware of this cat with the razor-sharp claws.

Let’s hear some Kenton, cat. This dead friend Buddy has some real hip stuff here, maybe there’s hope for him yet. Even though he’s worried about a Milton exam. Milton, was it? Shakespeare? What difference does it make? He’s worried about his exam, man, now that’s a real big worry, all right, the biggest.

In Act V, Scene III of Omelet, what does I-Feel-Ya say to Get-Rude?

“Get thee to a nunnery!” he shouted aloud, and then he began laughing.

Kenton, here I cometh.

He went to the record player and then fished through the Kenton album, making his selections. He put the disks in place, turned the player up full, and then lay back full length on the couch, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Tam-pee-co,” the speaker blared,

 “Tam-pee-co,

  On the Gulf of

         Meh-

           hee-

             co...”

He listened to the swinging lilt of June Christy’s voice, picking out the deep tenor saxophone of Vido Musso behind her, the wild trombone of Kai Winding, hearing the intricate brass figures when the trumpet section took over, hearing the screech horn in the background, becoming a part of the music. The record ended abruptly, and he heard the hum of the arm swinging back, the click of the second record dropping into place, the buzzing scratch as the record began spinning and the arm captured the first groove, and then “Artistry Jumps” began its insinuatingly sadistic bludgeoning.

There was something wild about Kenton, something like a lightning storm unleashed, the thunder growling, but mostly the lightning, bouncing with electric fury, illuminating the landscape of his mind. There was passion and lust in the music, and it crashed against his soul in waves of sound, crashed the way Dizzy Gillespie crashed, but more solidly, the same drive, with Gillespie perhaps a little more subtle in his bop intricacies, Kenton more concerned with the sheer overwhelming power of the sound bludgeon, but each concerned with the naked revelation of passion and lightning. The music thudded against his ears and his body, sinking into his blood stream and into the marrow of his bones.

He suddenly wanted his horn in his hands.

He swung his feet over the side of the couch, stood, and walked rapidly to where his case rested near the hall closet. He picked up the case and brought it to the couch, and his fingers trembled on the clasps as he opened it. He lifted the horn from its bed, and his fingers sought the valves, and he felt the compassionate tenderness flood over him. He wanted to play very badly now, and when he heard the sock chorus he was dismayed because he’d wanted to join in with the shrieking trumpets. He realized abruptly that he could turn the record back to any groove he wanted, come in on the change of key, or the sock, or wherever he wanted, and play straight through to the second ending, and he felt a gladness sweep over him again, as if he had discovered a basic truth about himself.

He shoved his mouthpiece onto the horn, opened the spit valve, and blew the horn clean of moisture. His hands were trembling, and his eyes were bright. At this moment he wanted more than anything in the world to play with the Kenton band. He lifted the player arm and then dropped it on the edge of the record, and he listened while the steady Kenton build-up began again.

He kept his horn to his mouth, flexing his lips against it, moving the horn away for a fraction of an inch every now and then so that he could run his tongue over the ring of muscle.

He was very excited now, waiting for his cue as if he were on stage someplace, listening to the slow crescendo of the music, waiting to begin blowing. The band was gaining steady momentum, building to the shrieking, screeching, socking, rocking, roaring sock chorus.

Not yet.

He wet his lips again.

A few more seconds... a few...

Now!

He began blowing.

He heard a strange sound in the room, a sound like a bleat or a moan from a wounded animal. He looked around him curiously, not turning his head, just moving his eyes, surprised. He kept blowing, but the sound persisted, a curiously wailing sound, like a baby crying, like a baby who needed his diaper changed. The sound was harsh and grating, and it clashed with the smooth, powerful, driving music Kenton was making. He could not hear himself over this other sound, and he wanted to shout to the baby to shut up — can’t you see I’m playing, can’t you see I’m playing again after all this time? Shut up, shut up!

And then he knew what was making the sound.

He took the trumpet from his lips.

He felt very empty and very alone, suddenly drained of all gladness. His eyes were wet. The Kenton band wound up the record, the disk above it dropped down to cover it, and he heard a new tune begin, but he could not identify the music, nor did he try to.

He had just heard himself playing, and the memory of the sound wrenched at his heart, filling him with a helpless misery he had never known before. It was as if he suddenly realized that everything was truly gone now, not only Carol, and not only his money or his clothes or his big ideas, and not only his self-respect, because all of those things could return if he really wanted them badly enough.

But his talent was gone, too, as if he’d never known how to play, as if he were just a... just a slob picking up the horn and putting it to his lips, not knowing how to fit his mouth to the mouthpiece, not knowing how to breathe or move his fingers. God, where had his armature gone? Where were his lungs? What had made that horrible sound? Oh, Jesus was that sound, that sound...

He threw the horn onto the couch, and then he snapped off the record player, and the room was very silent again, and he sat at the core of the silence, wetting his lips over and over.

The tears streamed down his face, and he felt himself trembling, but not with excited anticipation this time, trembling with a need for something, a need for someone to tell him everything would be all right again, he’d learn to blow again, he’d pass the audition with Laddy Fredericks, and they’d love him, all he needed was some brushing up, get the lip back in shape, shouldn’t Carol be here by now, where was Bud, Helen, Helen...

He stared around the room helplessly, his hands dangling between his knees, the tears in his eyes clouding his vision. He was alone, all alone. There was no one to reassure him, no one to help him now, not a friend in the world, not a...

He stopped crying, and he brought up his head and looked toward the closed closet door.

Slowly he began to nod.

He had a friend, after all. He had a very old friend.

17

Carol came into the apartment at eleven-twenty. He opened the door for her, and he smiled vapidly, and she looked at him curiously.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Huh?” he said. “Oh, sure. I was napping when you knocked.”

“Oh.” She paused, studying his face again. “You’re sure you’re all right?” He looked a little groggy, but that meant nothing, of course, especially if he’d been napping.

“I’m fine, honey,” he said. “Been waiting for you all morning.”

“But you said you were—”

“Finally fell asleep all over again,” he explained. “What took you so long?”

“I had a damned flat,” she said vehemently. “Has Bud gone?”

“Yes, long time ago.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“No.”

“Shall I get you something?”

“No.”

“Trouble with the stomach again?”

“No. No, I feel fine.”

“Then why don’t you take some breakfast?”

“All right. A cup of coffee, maybe.”

She was wearing a beige suit, the jacket unbuttoned over a coral sweater. She took off the jacket and hung it in the closet, and then she shoved the sleeves of the sweater to her elbows, showing her well-rounded forearms and the light golden down on them.

“You look pretty,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“But you always look pretty.”

“Well, thanks. Where does Bud keep his coffee?”

“Cabinet over the stove. Unquote.”

She went into the kitchen and found the jar of coffee. She put on some water to boil and then walked into the living room.

“This is like old times, isn’t it?” Andy said.

“I suppose.”

“I mean, you know. Us together, cup of coffee, stuff like that.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Trouble with us, Carol, was that I never fully appreciated you.”

“Let’s not talk about it. Have you had any pains today?”

“Not a one.”

“Good. What’d you do with that package of heroin you had yesterday?”

“Huh?”

“The heroin. The stuff you picked up when you—”

“Oh, oh, that. Still got it. Why?”

“I think you’d better give it to me.”

“What for?”

“Andy, why tempt yourself? Give it to me, and I’ll get rid of it.”

“You planning on shooting up, Carol?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh, don’t be silly. Andy—”

“I always suspected you of being a sneak addict. That’s the worst kind, Carol. That’s the kind—”

“Seriously, Andy. Let me get rid of it.”

He chuckled. “How would you get rid of it? You wouldn’t know where to take—”

“I’ll flush it down the toilet bowl.”

“Honey, you’d be flushing ten bucks out to sea. That’s foolish.”

“I’ll give you the ten dollars,” Carol said. “Where’s the heroin?”

“No, keep your money. I’ll be damned if I’m going to take anything else from you. I hocked Bud’s bag, and I’ll redeem it. Now, let’s not have any more talk about the jive. Now, do you hear me, Carol?”

“All right,” she said wearily.

They sat in silence for several moments, and then she said, “Coffee should be ready. Want to come in now?”

He rose, and they went into the kitchen together, and she spooned the powdered coffee into their cups.

“Not too much for me,” Andy said.

“All right.”

She put the kettle back on the stove, and they sat together drinking.

“We should have got married,” he said suddenly.

“Do you think so?”

“Sure I think so. I wouldn’t have said so if I didn’t think so.”

Carol smiled weakly. “You never asked me,” she said.

“Would you have married me if I’d asked? I mean, if I hadn’t gone crazy with myself, would you have?”

“I suppose so.”

“It could have been real nice,” he said wistfully. “I think I’d have liked being married to you. I mean, like we could have had coffee together every morning like this. That would’ve been nice.” He paused. “Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“We used to have a lot of fun together,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t deny that, can you?”

“No, I can’t deny that.”

“Before Bud and the boys left for the service, and even while they were gone. You have to admit we had a lot of fun in those days, Carol.”

“Yes.”

“A lot of fun,” he repeated, “and we made a good couple, too. We always looked good together, Carol, and that’s a fact. Jesus, sometimes I wonder—” He cut himself off.

“What, Andy?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just wonder where the hell did it all go? Jesus, where the hell did it all go?”

“It’ll be different,” Carol said softly. “Once you’re all right again, things will be different.”

“Sure,” he said, “sure, I know they will. Carol, do you think... Jesus, do you think I can do it? Do you think I really can kick it?”

“I know you can,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus, wouldn’t that be great? Oh, God, if I only could. If I only could do it, Carol, I’d... I’d give anything if I only could do it. Kick the monkey off and get back on the right road again. It’s been such a damn long time since I’ve been on the right track. And this Fredericks gig is really something, you know that, don’t you? He’s got a corny outfit, but what difference does it make, so long as you’re blowing steady. There’s no such thing as corny, except when you’re a kid, and you can’t be a kid all your life, can you, Carol?”

“No,” she said.

“So look, look, if I can kick this, I mean really kick it, get off it for good, not even look at it any more, and if I can land the Fredericks gig, well... things’ll be okay again, won’t they? I mean, you know I can play trumpet, don’t you?”

“You’re a wonderful trumpet player,” she said.

“Sure, so all it amounts to is staying cool, that’s all, so everybody can know I’m good. Honey, I... I want that job, you know, and I’m really gonna blow when I get it — oh, Jesus, how I’m gonna blow, like... like I never did before. I’m gonna... I’m gonna practice again, every day, and I’m gonna start taking lessons again, just as soon as I land this gig, just as soon as I’ve kicked the habit. Jesus, Carol, I’ll be free again, do you realize what that means? I won’t have to be scrounging around any more, I won’t be a bum — a bum, that’s what I am — I’ll be somebody, something, I’ll stand up there and I’ll knock the walls down with my horn.”

He was out of breath now, and his eyes were glistening. He reached across the table and took Carol by the wrist, and his fingers tightened around the wrist, and he said, “And if I make the band, and if I... I’m all right again, maybe we could... I mean...”

“What, Andy?”

“Do you think you’d... do you think you could marry me, Carol?”

She stared at him curiously, as if she hadn’t heard him. He waited for her answer, leaning across the table, his hand around her wrist.

“I know I shouldn’t even ask, Jesus, not after the way I’ve been, not after spitting in your eye whenever you tried to help. I know I shouldn’t, Carol, but I’m asking anyway because you know you’re the only one, the only girl who ever mattered a damn to me, Carol. I never should have let you go. I should have locked you up someplace, I should have killed myself before I let you go, but I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, honey, and I’ll get down on my hands and knees if you want me to, I’ll kiss your feet if you want, but say yes, Carol, say you’ll marry me if I straighten out, say you will, honey, please, please. Because I know now that I... honey, honey, tears? No, please, don’t cry, please, Carol, I don’t want to make you cry, I don’t want to make you cry ever again.”

He stood and walked around the table, and he cradled her head, and she wept against his chest.

“Your shirt,” she said. “I’m getting... your shirt all wet.”

“Don’t cry, Carol. Please don’t.”

“Andy, do... do you mean it? What you said?”

“Yes, oh, Jesus, yes! I’ve never meant anything so much in my life.”

“I’d—” she swallowed hard, and then she smiled — “I’d be... very happy to... to marry you,” she said.

He kissed her fleetingly, and then he went back to the other side of the table, and he sat grinning at her, feeling somewhat guilty all at once for what had happened before she’d arrived, but feeling a new strength within him, too, and knowing that now he would kick the habit, kick it once and for all.

They went into the living room, and they sat quietly. The silence was not a strained one, nor did either of them make any effort to speak, as if conversational communication were no longer necessary between them. They were like a tired, contented couple in a small-town waiting room, waiting for the three A.M. train.

When the train came, neither of them heard it.

Bud shoved his key into the door lock, twisted it, and then threw the door open. He glanced briefly into the living room and then went into the kitchen and directly to the refrigerator. Carol came into the kitchen as he was pouring himself a glass of milk.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Lousy,” he said. “I flunked.”

“Bud, you didn’t!”

“What choice was there? Half of it was Greek to me.”

“Oh, Bud, I’m terribly sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. He drained the glass and poured it full to the brim again. Andy came into the kitchen, a smile on his face.

“How’s the scholar?” he asked, and he couldn’t have picked a worse opening question.

“Right in his grave,” Bud snapped. “Thanks a lot.”

“What happened?” Andy asked.

“Just what I knew would happen. What do you think?”

“What happened, Carol?”

“He thinks he flunked.”

“I know I flunked. Never mind any thinking. I flunked that test as sure as God made little green apples.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Andy said.

“You ought to be. Why couldn’t you have shut up for a little while?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was—”

“What did you think you were doing then? Did you think I could study with you rattling on about everything that’s happened since the Ice Age? Did you think—”

“Bud,” Carol said gently.

“No, Carol, I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel. I don’t mind helping out, but goddamnit when I extend a hand I don’t expect it to be chewed off at the elbow.”

“I’ll go,” Andy said.

“Where will you go?” Bud asked. “Answer me that.”

“I’ll find a place.”

“Yeah, you’ll find a place. And then you’ll be right back on the band wagon again.”

“Well, I didn’t want to interrupt your studying. Believe me, Bud, I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world.”

“That’s very nice of you, but it’s already happened.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Andy asked.

“Nothing. Just shut up for the next few days so I won’t flunk the whole rotten battery, that’s all.”

“No, I’ll go.”

“Oh, wipe that stupid martyred look from your face, will you? I’m getting sick of seeing you running around like Joan of Arc.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“Who the hell are you trying to kid, anyway, Andy?” Bud shouted. “You act as if everyone but yourself is to blame for your goddamn habit! Well, get that out of your head, will you? And learn to be a civilized human being. Nobody owes you anything, remember that. Anything you’re getting is gravy.”

“Bud, for God’s sake—” Carol started.

“Let him talk,” Andy said tightly.

“Sure, let him talk. Andy approves of talk. All Andy does is talk, talk, talk. Well, I’m fed up with Andy’s talk. He talked me right out of a passing grade in Milton — and he may have talked me into an extra semester as well.”

“Who cares whether you get out in three and a half years or not?” Andy snapped.

“I’m in a hurry,” Bud answered rapidly.

“Why? Where the hell are you going in such a hurry?”

“Listen, I don’t have to—”

“Never mind,” Andy said. “I’m getting out. I’m not going to stick around if you feel—”

“He wants me to get down on my hands and knees and beg him to stay,” Bud said. “Well, kid, you’ve got another guess coming. You want to go, good-by!”

“I’m going, Carol.”

“Bud, couldn’t we—”

“Let him go if he wants to. We can’t wipe his nose for the rest of his life.”

“Nobody’s asking you to wipe my nose,” Andy shouted. “Your own nose could use a little wiping, if you ask me. Go back to your books. Have yourself a ball. I won’t bother you again, don’t worry.”

“We need a little ‘Hearts and Flowers’ for this,” Bud said.

“I think you should stay here, Andy,” Carol said.

“And listen to this bull? I know when I’m not wanted, all right.”

“Poor little Andy,” Bud said. “Nobody wants him.”

“Look, Bud—”

“Look, Andy, let’s get this straight between us,” Bud said. “I don’t care if you go or stay or drop dead, understand? I just don’t care any more. When Carol called with her sob story, I figured, okay, do a turn for an old friend. Okay, I’m always ready to do a turn for an old friend. Old friend needs a place to stay; sure, bring him around. But I’ve worked pretty hard for the past three years, and I don’t want to see all that shot to hell, understand? I may be able to squeeze my way out of one flunk, but it’ll be murder if I flunk another test. If you stay here — and mind you, I’m not coaxing you because I don’t give a damn one way or the other — you’d better just shut up for the remainder of the week. You’d better just pretend you’re all alone in the apartment. If you feel like talking, go into the john and talk to yourself. If you want to practice, put in a mute and go up on the roof. But leave me alone. Stay or go but, either way, leave me alone.”

“I’ll go,” Andy said.

“Fine.”

“You’ll stay,” Carol told him.

“What for? He’s made himself pretty plain, hasn’t he? He wants me out. So, out I go.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Seems to me that’s what he said.”

“Why do you want to get out, Andy? So you can get some stuff?”

“I haven’t even given it a thought.”

“Then why do you want to get out?”

“He doesn’t want me here,” Andy said patiently.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, stay,” Bud said. “I knew it would get down to that. Everybody bends over backward for Andrew the Great.”

“Sure, Andrew the Great,” Andy said mockingly.

“And here comes the self-pity routine again. Look, stay. Do me a favor and stay. Please stay, Andy, old pal. Okay? Are you happy now? Stay.”

Andy did not look at Bud. “I won’t make any noise or anything,” he said. “I promise.”

“All right.”

“I’d go, but I don’t know where to go. I want to break the habit, I really want to break it. Can’t you understand that? Just help me do it. Just help me. Just... let me stay. I... I won’t say a word, I swear it. But help me, for God’s sake, help me.”

Bud felt suddenly very small. He looked at Carol, and then he spread his hands and opened his mouth as if to say something, and then he shook his head and started to say something again. He closed his mouth a second time, and finally he spoke.

“I didn’t mean to needle you, kid,” he said. “Stay as long as you like. The place is yours. And practice wherever the hell you want to. I don’t mind. I know that job is important.”

“Your tests are important, too,” Andy said. “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, if I... if I...” He seemed ready to say more, but he just kept shaking his head, over and over again.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Bud said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize to me. Don’t do that, Bud, because you were right about everything, all of it. I’m just a headache, and I know it, and this isn’t self-pity, Bud. I’ve been a headache to everyone who’s come near me in the past — how many years? That’s why... why I need help. I can’t do it alone, I know that. I thought I could, but now I know I can’t. I... I need someone near me, always... someone to... so let me stay, Bud, and I swear to God I’ll never be able to thank you enough. I swear to God I’ll kiss your feet if you just let me stay, if you’ll just help me, help me.”

“Sure,” Bud said, unable to account for the lump in his throat. “Stay with me, Andy.”

“I appreciate this,” Andy said softly.

“Why... why don’t you make some coffee, Carol? I think we could... could all use a cup.”

Carol did not leave until five, and then Bud tried to get down to studying again, but he could not forget the way he’d behaved, and the effect his behavior seemed to be having on Andy.

Along about two Andy began to fidget. They’d been sitting at the kitchen table, and suddenly, unaccountably, he began to drum his fingers on the table top. He kept that up until he realized he was annoying both Bud and Carol, and he apologized and stopped drumming. His feet began to jiggle then. He kept his toes glued to the floor, and he bounced his knees, up and down, up and down, moving them incessantly, until you could feel the vibration of the table and the floor.

Finally, as if he could no longer sit still, even with the compensating jiggle of his feet, he rose and went into the living room, and he began pacing the floor, but pacing it with a sort of controlled fury.

“What is it?” Carol had asked, and he’d simply answered, “I feel restless.”

Bud knew, of course, that a portion of his restlessness could be attributed to his abrupt withdrawal from the drug. But he’d seemed all right this morning, with none of the nervous anxiety he’d exhibited the night before, none of the vomiting, none of the varied symptoms of the addict suddenly cut from his source of supply.

His sudden restlessness, therefore, was puzzling. Bud knew very little about what was to be expected of a reforming addict, but he nonetheless imagined Andy’s current behavior, after so many days of withdrawal, was strange. And, feeling guilty as hell for his earlier outburst, he blamed himself in part for Andy’s fidgeting.

The fidgeting reached mammoth proportions along about three in the afternoon. Continually pacing, Andy began to scratch himself, idly at first, scratching his arm, and then his back, and then his face. Bud and Carol watched him, trying to make conversation at the same time, but finding talk a little difficult. Andy began scratching in earnest then, clawing at his back, rubbing at his stomach. He was sweating freely, and his face began to tic as if it would fall apart, the lips trembling, the eyes blinking. He wet his lips continuously, and then he clawed at the skin on his arms, pacing all the while, and then he said, “Jesus, oh, Jesus,” and he continued to claw and pace and tic and tremble and blink, until finally he ran into the bathroom, and the sick ugly sound came to their ears again.

“It’s very hard for him,” Carol said in a whisper.

“Yes,” Bud agreed.

Andy seemed to be in control of himself when he emerged from the bathroom. He looked a little pale, but all of his fidgeting was gone, and he sat down and joined the conversation, and everything was all right until Carol left at five.

The slow build-up began again then. Bud, occupied with American Lit II, poring over the notes and trying to glean something from them, heard the drumming fingers first. He looked up and then went back to his notes, but the drumming was a persistent tattoo — br-mm, br-mm, br-mm, br-mm, br-mm, br-mm...

He looked up again, and this time he caught Andy’s eye, and Andy said, “I’m sorry,” and he thrust both hands deep into his trouser pockets. His feet began jiggling then. And the scratching started. And the ticcing. And the blinking. And the harsh breathing. And the pacing. And the muttering. And the yawning.

Bud looked at him curiously, and he shook his head a little, watching his friend, wondering what was going on inside that goddamn head of his.

And inside that goddamn head of his a lot of things were going on simultaneously. Inside that goddamn head of his was an overwhelming urge to bolt for the door and scare up a fix someplace, anyplace, scare up a fix to still the clamor of his blood and his mind. Inside his head was the remembrance of what the drug could do, a remembrance that had been squashed and then tasted again this morning, but that had been a very long time ago, and the need had clawed his stomach to ribbons earlier today, and now it was back again, a need he could feel and taste and sense, a need that was as real as his trembling hands were. If he did not get a fix soon, if he did not get a fix soon, he would kick the windows out of the walls. He would cut off his arm, he would pluck out his eyes, he would spit his teeth into the washbasin. He was going crazy with the need. He was lower than he’d ever been, sick with the need, wanting that drug with every fiber in his body, wanting it desperately and urgently, and all he could do was pace the floor of the apartment, and scratch the itch that was beneath his skin, and feel his lids blink over his eyes, and feel the tic at the corner of his mouth, and feel the roiling inside his stomach. I musn’t puke again, I have to have a fix, I need it!

And inside that goddamn head of his was a warring factor that threaded itself through the fabric of his need, puncturing it with a needle as sharp as the one he desired, a needle of self-condemnation. For if he had not touched the drug this morning, if he had only tossed the stuff away, smashed the works, dumped it all, forgotten it, forgotten it forever, the worst part would have been over now. He’d had it licked, and now he was back aboard again, and only he knew what was spinning through his body like a hot piece of steel, only he knew how badly he wanted, wanted, and all because he’d weakened this morning, all because he’d shot up when he hadn’t even really wanted the stuff — not like now, not like now when his head was ready to swing loose at the hinges, not like now when the top of his skull was ready to erupt. Jesus, Jesus, isn’t there something, isn’t there a gun someplace, something to shoot myself with?

What am I doing here?

What am I doing pacing here, up and down, what the hell am I doing?

Why don’t I get out of here? I can cop easily, bread or no bread. I can get the bread from somebody, hock my jacket if I have to, and then I’ll find the Man, and I’ll roll into some pad where it’s soft and quiet, and I’ll boot that mother-loving White God until it comes out of my ears. I’ll kick it to Boston and back, I’ll kick that goddamn jive until my eyes are bugging out of my head, until I’m so blind I can’t walk, until I’m stoned dead.

WHY AM I STAYING HERE!

Stay where you are, you simple son-of-a-bitch, his mind pleaded. Stay where you are because where you are is safe, but, oh, how I want it, how I want it, sweet Jesus, please, please, help me, help me get it, help me get away from it, get it, get it, get, I need it!

I’m not fooling, I need it. I’m not kidding, I need it bad. I’m real sick, God, I’m real sick, and I need that stuff, I need the jive, please help me, please make me, do something, something, please, please.

Easy now, easy, I’m excited, but please, I’m sick, but please, I’m hungry for it, I can taste it, I want to be blind, I want to be stoned, I want to be high, high, high, high, HIGH, GODDAMNIT, PLEASE, PLEASE DO SOMETHING FOR ME, PLEASE!

Shake it, shake that habit, kick the monkey off your back, don’t think about it, don’t think about anything connected with it, oh, would I love a speedball now, even just a little cocaine mixed in with the hoss, even just a little, but, oh, would a speedball knock my brains out, oh, would a speedball gas the hell out of me, what am I gonna do, how am I gonna take it any more, what am I gonna do, have I got any left, no, all gone, but I’ve got the works, I’ve still got the works, I’ll get out of here and find something someplace. A cap, cap and a half, I’ll settle even for a cap, I’ll settle for anything, anything, even for beat stuff, even for lemon, anything, anything at all, CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, GODDAMNIT?

“Who’s there?” Bud asked.

“Helen,” the voice beyond the door answered.

Thank God, Andy thought. Thank you, God.

18

Bud rose and went slowly to the door. He had forgotten that Helen was coming this evening, and now, with only the wood of the door between them, he felt a curiously fluttering panic in his stomach. He reached out for the doorknob, not wanting to open the door, not wanting to see her again, not after all that had happened, knowing he definitely did not want to see her again, ashamed of himself, deeply ashamed, and not wanting this living reminder of his shame. But she was outside the door, and as inexorably as the steady creep of time, his hand found the doorknob, and twisted the doorknob, and pulled back the door, and she was standing there, unsmiling.

She had not changed much. She looked more mature, more wise perhaps, but her face was still the same, and he felt the unbidden quickening of his heart when he saw that face, when his eyes found her eyes, green and slightly tilted, Chinese eyes, wise and knowing eyes. She wore her hair short now, the pageboy gone, clipped close to her head, framing her face with a deep lustrous black. She wore a sweater and skirt, and he saw the rounded mounds of her small, perfectly formed breasts beneath the sweater, and then his eyes fled back to her face again, swallowed in the depth of her eyes, swallowed there in a sea of wisdom and knowledge and regret.

“Hello, Bud,” she said softly.

“Helen,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

He took her hand, but she held his only briefly and then dropped it, her eyes leaping into the apartment and finding Andy. She stepped inside, and Bud closed the door behind her. She put her purse down on the butterfly chair, and Andy forced a smile and said, “Hi, Helen, I thought you’d never get here.”

“How have you been?” she asked.

Her eyes did not leave his face. They searched his eyes, they spotlighted the tic at the corner of his mouth, they probed the blinking lids.

“Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

“It’s been rough, hasn’t it?”

“The roughest.” He smiled wanly.

“You going it cold turkey?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the only way. How long have you been off it?”

Andy hesitated for a moment. “Little more than a week,” he said.

A cloud passed over Helen’s face. “How long, Andy?”

“Well, maybe a little less. Maybe five days or so.”

“You’re lying,” she said flatly.

“What?”

“I said you’re lying. Has he left the apartment, Bud?”

“Why, yes. He—”

“Did you cop, Andy?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Did you cop’?”

“I got some stuff, yes, but I—”

“He didn’t take it, Helen,” Bud said, feeling strangely outside the conversation, feeling even outside the realm of their thought or their jargon.

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Andy said.

“The stuff. You said you—”

“I dumped it.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“When this morning?”

“Nine, ten o’clock, I don’t remember.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”

“Where’d you dump it?”

“Down the toilet.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not, Helen. Helen, I wouldn’t—”

“You shot up, Andy. You shot up, and now you’re plenty sick. Andy, don’t lie to me because I’ve been through this and back again, and I know all the signs, and you don’t show the signs of a man who’s been cool for a week, or even for five days. You look like a man who’s overdue, and, goddamnit, Andy, why’d you do it? Why’d you go back to it?”

“I didn’t, Helen. I just don’t feel so hot, that’s all. You know how it is when you’re kicking the jive. What makes you think—”

“Andy, don’t lie to me. You never could lie to me, Andy, so don’t start now.”

“But I’m not lying, Helen. I swear to God, I haven’t touched a drop since—”

“Since when, Andy?”

“Since—” He could not complete the sentence.

“How much did you take?”

“A cap,” he lied.

“Andy.”

“A cap and a half, two caps, I don’t remember.”

“When?”

“This morning. About nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember.”

“Andy, Andy, why?”

“Y is a crooked letter,” he shouted. “Don’t get on my back. I got enough troubles without your climbing on my back.”

“Where’s the outfit?”

“In the closet. In my jacket pocket.”

“Get it,” she said.

He went to the closet, and Bud watched him, still feeling strange, feeling as if he were listening to an argument between a man and his wife, feeling left out of it completely, the way a little boy does when his mother and father are bickering.

Andy brought the jacket back to Helen.

“The spoon,” she said, and he handed her the spoon. Helen looked at it carefully and then asked, “Where’s the spike?”

He took the syringe from the jacket pocket and was handing it to her when she said, “No, hold onto it. Where’d you get it?”

“On the Union Floor. From Rog.”

“He won’t miss it,” Helen said. “Get rid of it, Andy.”

Andy stared at the syringe on the palm of his hand, puzzled, and then he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Get rid of it.”

“You can get rid of it. Here, take it.”

“No, I want you to get rid of it. You’re the only one who can do it, Andy.”

“What the hell do you want from me, anyway? I got to return the spike, don’t I? What the hell are you climbing all over me for?”

“Andy, do as I say,” Helen said tightly.

“No! No, I won’t do as you say! Everybody wants me to do as they say. Well, I’m goddamn good and sick of doing what everybody wants me to do. Everybody can go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut, you understand that? That includes you, and Bud, and anybody else you want to drag in! What the hell am I, a kid or something, everybody has to come around and wipe my nose for me? Well, I’m not a kid! I know what I’m doing, and if you want to get rid of that hype, you can do it yourself, you understand that?”

“Andy—”

“Shut up! Jesus, for once in your life, can’t you shut up? I’m doing all I can to keep my head from busting open, and you come around screaming about a syringe — what the hell you want me to do with the goddamn thing, anyway?”

“Destroy it,” Helen said, almost spitting the words.

“What for? What harm’s the hype without what to put in it? You think I’ve got any of the white stuff? You think I’d be sitting around with my stomach ready to split if I had any of the junk? I’d be shooting it so damn fast, it’d make your head spin. I’d be maining it like a madman, that’s what I’d be doing, so what the hell are you screaming about the hype for, what do you want me to do, why the hell doesn’t everyone leave me alone?”

He suddenly seized the syringe tightly, and he brought it back over his head and then whipped his arm down violently, and the syringe left his hand. It spun across the room dizzily and then collided with the plaster, bouncing off and onto the floor, miraculously still in one piece.

“Is that what you want?” he shouted. “All right, all right?”

Helen reached out for his arm, but he shook her off and lunged across the room, bringing his foot back and kicking out at the syringe. He missed the syringe, and he lost his footing and went down to the floor, landing on his back. There was shock and surprise on his face, and then his features curled into a menacing leer as he scrambled to his feet.

“Where is it?” he screamed. “Where is the mother-lover?”

“Andy, don’t—”

“Where is it? Where is it?”

He whirled, as if searching for an elusive rat, his eyes scanning the floor. He seemed no longer to be Andy. He seemed like a strange and maniacal stranger who had come down from a mountain cave. He spotted the syringe, and his lip curled, and he raced for it and stamped at it, grazing the glass cylinder so that the syringe snapped out from under his foot, still intact, the needle glistening. He reversed his field, and he kicked out at the syringe again, missing again, kicking again and missing yet another time, out of breath now, chasing the elusive, dancing, rolling glass cylinder with its pointed needle. And then he slumped against the wall, his head bent, and he mumbled, “I can’t break it, I can’t break it. Helen, I can’t catch up with it, I can’t... I’m sick, Helen, I’m sick as hell, Helen, I’m sick, I’m sick, Helen, please help me, Helen, I’m sick...”

She took him into the bathroom, and she stayed in there with him, and Bud could hear the soothing sound of her voice beneath the ugly sounds Andy was making. He sat outside in the living room, wondering again how he’d ever got into something like this, dismayed because he’d learned that Andy had gone back to the drug again, after all his talk, after all that. God, wouldn’t he ever learn, was he a coward at heart?

He listened to the sounds coming from his bathroom, and he thought of his other tests, and he thought of Andy in that bathroom, and Helen, two strangers, two people he thought he’d never see again as long as he lived, and here they were in his apartment, disrupting his life, turning his life into a shambles. Doesn’t my life count at all, is Andy the only important one around here, is Andy the only one who matters? What about me? Goddamnit, what about me?

He saw the glint of the needle lying on the floor, and he went to it and picked up the syringe, rotating it slowly in his hands. The needle was short and slender, a narrow polished arrow. He studied the pointed tip and then the graduated markings on the glass cylinder. The hypodermic seemed to own a life of its own. It sat on the palm of his hand and it seemed like an evil, throbbing thing to him, a malevolent thing which had reached out and engulfed Andy in a black, foul-smelling cloud. It was graceful and sleek, but beneath its polished good looks lay the intricate machinery of the devil, and he was tempted for a moment to do just what Andy had tried to do and failed at. He wanted to bring back his arm and throw the syringe at the wall, watch it splinter into a thousand flying fragments. He wanted to stab the needle at the plaster, stab it until the plaster chipped from the wall, until the needle was twisted and bent and useless, until all the evil life had left the syringe, until it was nothing but a broken heap of glass and steel.

“Don’t blame the syringe,” Helen said, and he looked up, surprised to see her back in the room. From the bathroom, he heard the sound of the water tap, and he knew that Andy was washing up again.

“They should never have invented syringes,” Bud said, still obsessed with the idea of it as a sentient, evil thing.

“Some junkies use eye droppers,” Helen said, “either with or without a needle. It’s more difficult without the needle, and not very pretty to watch because you have to tear the skin with a safety pin or a razor blade first and then insert the glass tip of the dropper into the vein. But you don’t need a syringe, Bud. Where there’s a will there’s a way — and there’s always a will when you’re a horsehead.”

“I suppose,” Bud said weakly. “What do you want to do with this?”

“I’ll take it,” she said. “I don’t think it should stay in this apartment, do you?”

“No.” He handed her the syringe, and she took it and went to her purse. He watched her as she unsnapped the purse and dropped the syringe into its depths.

She turned, and he felt embarrassed watching her, and so he averted his eyes. Helen sat in the butterfly chair and sighed, as if she were very very tired.

“He’ll need watching, Bud.”

“Yes.” Bud paused. “I can’t say this is very convenient for me right now.”

“It’s a little inconvenient for all of us,” Helen said, and her voice grew suddenly sharp. “I’m sure Carol doesn’t like the idea of running over here, and I don’t particularly relish it either. Drug addicts are not convenient. Hardly anything in life is.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Bud said. “I was just wondering if... Well, if anything would come of it.”

“We won’t know until it’s over, will we?”

“No, I guess we won’t.”

“You can only fix horse races. Life — oh, what the hell — I’ve stopped trying to figure it out.”

“Do you think he’ll break it?”

“Maybe. I hope so.”

“Isn’t it a bad sign? That he went back to it so soon?”

“It’s not good, but it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. He seems impressed by what he’s done, though. He seems to know that he took a big step backward this morning. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Is it very hard to break?”

Helen looked at him curiously, and then she smiled maternally. “Yes, Bud, it’s very hard to break,” she said quietly.

Bud nodded.

“You never break it,” she added.

“You broke it.”

“Did I?”

“Well, didn’t you? You don’t use drugs any more.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, then... you broke it.”

“Yes, I broke it.” She was silent for several moments.

“How do people get started on it, anyway?” Bud asked. “Jesus, you’d think they’d have more sense.”

“You can’t believe any drug addict when he talks about how his habit began,” Helen said. “I’ve talked to dozens of them, and most of them lie. They’ll tell you they got started on opiates because they were sick once, and a doctor prescribed morphine or one of the other opium alkaloids, and they built a tolerance and a habit and, pity the poor souls, they are now addicts. But most junkies are on heroin, and heroin is never used therapeutically, so what are you to believe?”

“Well, then how do they get started?”

“How?” Helen smiled. “We’re sick.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Yes, believe me. And drug addiction is only one symptom of a... well, a basic personality defect. We’re like alcoholics, except their poison is liquid.”

“It sounds hard to believe.”

“Figure it out for yourself. What does the drug mean to a junkie? Just the kick? Just the boot? A whole lot more than that, don’t you see? It’s—” She shrugged — “I hate to throw psychology at you, but it’s an escape mechanism. You take the drug, and you wipe out all the little failures and disappointments that keep sneaking up on you. You take the drug, and your ambitions stop being dreams — they become accomplishments. It’s a way of escaping responsibility.” She paused and eyed Bud levelly. “There are worse ways of escaping responsibility.”

Bud nodded blankly.

“We’re all of us addicts,” Helen said.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“We all have fears, and hopes, and disappointments. And we all compensate for them in one way or another.”

“Sure, but the normal devices—”

“That’s just it,” Helen said. “The addict turns to a more drastic means, but he achieves the same end. What’s he trying to do, when you get right down to it? Nothing but deaden the pain of frustration. He can’t compensate in the real world, so he invents his own world, and he runs into it to hide. Why is there so much addiction in slum areas? Only because the drug is more readily available there?”

“I imagine it is,” Bud said.

“Hell, I can make a buy in five minutes right on Times Square,” Helen said. “No, it’s because so many people in those areas are trying to bridge the gap, trying to make the dream the reality.”

“Andy doesn’t come from a slum area,” Bud reminded her.

“No, he doesn’t,” Helen agreed. “And neither do I. What are you asking? Our excuse?”

“Well...”

“How can you make a blanket observation on all drug addicts, when each one will have his own unique case history? The why and the how, don’t you see? Sometimes they’re similar, sometimes they vary. The cops concentrate on the how. How does a man get hooked? How does he get to know pushers? How can we stamp it out? The psychologists concentrate on the why, and the junkie himself concentrates on that same problem whenever he gives enough of a damn to question his motives at all. Why? The big why? Insecurity? A feeling of inferiority? Life too big? Life too small? Life too sordid? Why?”

“But if he reaches the point where he’s begun to question himself, shouldn’t he know the answers?”

“Sometimes,” Helen said. “Usually not. He just knows that he needs something, and the Something makes him feel all right. It happens that the Something is drugs. It could have been alcohol. It could have been snuff. It could have been sweets. That’s where the how enters. The why is there, and something is needed, and then the how offers narcotics, and the problem is solved. Stir well, heat to boiling, and you have a drug addict. Lord have mercy on his soul.”

“Then if drugs weren’t available—”

“But they are. In all shapes and all sizes and to fit every pocketbook. From cheap bammies you can pick up at about three for a quarter—”

“Bammies?”

“Low-grade marijuana,” Helen said. “You can get the better muggles, the bombers, for about a dollar each. You can get a cap of heroin for the same price, but it’ll be cut stuff. A deck of hoss might cost you a dollar, or it might cost you five. I’ve paid as much as five for a deck when I was real low, even though that’s an incredibly high price. It depends on what the traffic will bear, you see. Once a pusher’s got you hooked, he can do whatever he wants with you. A junkie likes to deal with the same pusher usually. He knows him, and he can trust him, and he’s reasonably certain he won’t get beat stuff from him, stuff that’s cut down to practically nothing but milk sugar. The pusher sets the price, and he knows just what he can get from you. He can tell at a glance. Sometimes he’ll show a burst of generosity and lay it on you practically free. Other times you’ll pay through the nose. Sometimes he’ll extend credit. Sometimes he’ll serve as a fence for stolen goods. But the pusher is boss, and pushers aren’t exactly honorable men.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“It’s a business, a multimillion-dollar business, and the men who run it happen to be vicious. You have to be vicious to put something like the speedball on the market. Do you know what a speedball is?”

“No,” Bud said.

“It’s a little capsule of mixed cocaine and heroin. Cocaine is an excitant, and heroin is a depressant. You put them together in one pellet and you get a speedball, and it’s just that, a red-hot speedball that rips the insides out of a junkie. You’re hyped up one minute, and you’re ready to nod the next. When the jag starts wearing off, you begin shaking and sweating and heaving out your guts, and you can’t stop until you get either a shot of C or a shot of H.”

“Jesus,” Bud said.

“A speedball is only one of the more uncivilized means of torture the drug bastards are selling.” Something bitter had crept into Helen’s voice. Her eyes were hard and bright now. “They should catch them all,” she said. “They should catch them all, and then they should hang them by their thumbs, and every junkie in the world should have a turn at kicking their brains out. Death should be the penalty for trading in drugs, Bud, the way it’s the penalty for kidnaping. Death, because these men are kidnaping lives, and usually they’re kidnaping young lives.”

“Well, that’s a little strong,” Bud said.

“Is it? Is it? Look at your friend in there.” She gestured toward the bathroom door. “He’s going through hell to break it, and if he doesn’t break it, he’ll still be in hell. He’s given up everything, even his talent, for heroin. He’s a slave to the bastard who makes ten cents on a reefer, and a slave to the bastard up the line who buys a kilo of eighty-five-percent pure heroin in Italy for about five thousand dollars and then sells it to a wholesaler here for about fifteen thousand. And the wholesaler is another bastard who’ll cut the drug all the way down, shove it into capsules or decks, and gross six hundred thousand on it. Bud, you can get a pound of M in Mexico for something like ten dollars, and by the time it’s sold as reefers in New York you’re realizing sixteen hundred on it. So don’t ask how or why somebody gets started. It’s too easy to start, believe me.”

“Do you know why... why you started?”

“Yes,” Helen answered. He waited for more, but she was silent now.

“Well,” he said weakly, “let’s hope Andy can break it, too.”

“It doesn’t mean breaking it for now alone, Bud,” she said. “It means breaking it forever. That’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Andy came out of the bathroom, his face shining. He looked much better, and he seemed to feel much better, too. “What’s not as easy as it sounds?” he asked.

“You look human,” Helen said, smiling.

“I feel human. What were you talking about?”

“The monkey.”

“Oh. That again.”

“It’ll always be that, Andy. You might as well face it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think this is the hardest part, don’t you? The kicking it now. This isn’t the hardest part at all, Andy.”

Andy smiled. “Hell, it can’t get much worse.”

“Ah, but it can. And long after you’ve kicked it, or after you think you’ve kicked it. Because you always remember it. It’s very hard to forget it, especially when things take a rough turn. You remember how easy it was to escape then. You look at what you’ve got, and what you’ve got seems almost impossible to bear. And you think of how it was when you had no real worries, nothing to plague you. And it can be a very simple thing that sets you off thinking desperately about it again. Your mother can be sick, or an aunt you loved can die, or... or you can have a run in your last pair of stockings, something as damn foolish as that, and all at once it’ll seem like too much for you, all at once life will have closed in and you can’t take it any more. You’ll stare at the railroad tracks on the tom stocking, and you’ll wonder how you can ever meet this situation, how you can possibly solve it, and there’ll seem to be no solution whatever. And it can happen with anything that suddenly upsets you emotionally, anything that disturbs the careful balance you’re trying to maintain.

“And seeing no solution, or feeling thwarted, or just feeling down in the dumps about anything at all, you’ll suddenly remember what it was like to be up in the clouds. And there’s your choice: down in the dumps or up in the clouds. And you begin to wonder why you shouldn’t be up in the clouds? What’s wrong with it? Why not? You forget all the rest of it in that moment. In that moment nothing counts but the happiness you know you can find if you go back to narcotics. The dream is better than the reality, and even the narcotics become a dream, and your memory of the dream is far better than the reality of narcotics. Because the reality is really a goddamn trap, and you know that, and you realize that, but at the same time you keep thinking of it, and so you try to shove it out of your mind, and you try to find something to be happy about.

“You need help right then. You need someone to stand by you and help you see your way through this. You need help desperately, not medical help, just the help of someone you know cares about you, just that kind of help, just reassurance. You need reassurance desperately, but you can’t think of anyone to turn to. There’s only one thing you can turn to, you feel, and you try to shake the image of the syringe from your mind, but it won’t be shaken. It sticks, and it sticks, until it blots out everything else in your mind, and then you start your devices.

“You tell yourself you’re happy. You tell yourself you are deliriously happy. You try to behave that way. You’ll make a silly joke. You’ll laugh at the joke, and whoever you’re with will think you’re very strange, laughing at such a silly joke, not knowing you’re really whistling in the dark. You’ll try to maintain this buoyancy, because you know happiness is your only salvation, and yet you know all the while that you’re really sad, and you know the happiness is a front, but you try to live up to that front because you won’t admit your sadness, won’t admit your utter desolation. Once you admit it, you’re lost. Once you admit it, you want a solution to it, and you turn to the only solution you know, and the solution is one that works. You know that. You know that because you’ve had the solution, and the solution works damned fine.

“You can almost taste it. The picture of the syringe is so large in your mind that you can read the centimeter marks on the cylinder. You can see the heroin, you can see the spoon, you can see the stuff in the syringe, and you can taste it. And so you try to blot it out. You try to blot out the picture by talking about other things — anything, anything at all to kill the pain you’re feeling, anything so that you won’t have to turn to the other painkiller, and all the while wanting someone to take your hand and lead you out, lead you to where it’s safe and secure and snug. And you try to blot out the taste by smothering it in other tastes. You’ll have a cup of coffee, and then you’ll have another cup of coffee, and then another, and another. You’ll sit somewhere, and you’ll talk to someone about anything in the world, anything but what is really bothering you, and you’ll drink coffee until it’s coming out of your ears, and you’ll smoke incessantly because there’s something very reassuring about a cigarette in your hand or hanging on your lips. You want that cigarette always. You put one out, and you light another one immediately afterward. You talk, and you drink your coffee incessantly, and you smoke incessantly, and you try to ride it out, and it seems you will never ride it out. But you have to keep being happy, you have to stay happy. There’s no one to help you, and so you have to help yourself. If only you can ride it out, if only you can ride it out.”

She stopped. The room was very silent. Andy stared at her, a defeated, hangdog expression on his face.

“I don’t want to scare you, Andy,” she said. “I’ve ridden them out, and I hope I’ll always ride them out. I wanted you to know, though, that it’s a constant fight. You haven’t licked it after a week, or after a month, or after a year, or maybe after ever. It’s always with you.”

“I guess so,” Andy said.

“It’s so easy to start,” she said, shaking her head. “So goddamn easy. You can be on the way to being an addict after a day, or after your first shot. And once you’re hooked, mister, you’ve entered the gates of Hell, and then try to break it. Then it’s not quite so easy.”

“Boy, I wish I knew why I started,” Andy said. “I mean, what the hell, I can remember exactly how, but who knows why? I had everything a guy could want, didn’t I? I had clothes, and a beautiful girl, and after the guys left for the service I began playing with a pretty decent outfit — not big time, but a big step forward. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the step, huh?” He shrugged. “Maybe I missed the guys more than I let on, maybe I still needed them, who knows? Beats the hell out of me. I didn’t seem to need anything, you know? I had everything I could ever want, I suppose.”

He shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“I’m sure of one thing, though. I’m going to break this goddamn habit, and I’m never going back to it.”

“You’ll break it,” Helen said. “And you’ll get on the Laddy Fredericks band. You wait and see. You’re going to be all right.” She stood up and looked at her watch. “I’d better get home. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, to see how it’s coming along.”

“Don’t worry about me, Helen,” Andy said. “I’ve seen the light.” He walked her to the door. “I swear to God I’ll never even look at it again. If I get the urge, I’ll tie myself to the kitchen sink, and I won’t budge from it. I swear to God.”

And he meant every word he said.

But he had sworn an oath earlier, too. He had sworn an oath two months after a party at which everyone had passed around a community needle. He had told himself, “May I drop dead in the gutter if I ever touch another drop of it.” And the earlier oath had priority, and Andy Silvera had no way of knowing about that priority, or that anything he did from now on would be entirely too late because the deck was stacked, and the cards were now being dealt.

Helen said her good-bys, and when she’d left, Andy cocked his head to one side and said, “Wonderful girl. Makes a lot of sense, too. Why does a guy get started? What the hell was there about me that made me start? The Artie Parker band was a good outfit. I loved Carol. What the hell could it have been? Hell, I was blowing fine in those days. Not the way I wanted to, but, Jesus, I’ve never blown the way I really wanted to. So what could it have been? I guess maybe I was just too young, you know. I guess maybe somebody like you should have been around, to lend a helping hand every now and then, sort of keep the balance, do you know what I mean, Bud? But, hell, you were in the navy, and I was on my own, and so I just

19

change of key, i

FEBRUARY-MARCH, 1945

The party at Buff Collier’s house was starting off with a bang, or rather had started off with a bang some four hours before. When Andy and Carol, and the other musicians and their girls, arrived the brawl was in full swing, and they were greeted at the door like soldiers come to liberate a concentration camp.

“The music!” Buff shouted. “The music is here,” and then she swayed across the room and jumped up into the arms of a tall boy with long black hair. The boy held her unsteadily, and then other healthy-looking boys and other healthy-looking teen-age girls rushed across the room and began taking coats and hats.

“How was the prom?” one of the boys asked Artie, and Artie said, “A big drag.”

“Here’s the piano, Artie!” someone shouted, and Artie shouted back, “Where’s the juice?” and the boys in the band drifted over to where the bottles and the setups stood on a long table. Andy mixed himself a strong Scotch and soda, handing one to Carol, and then toasting themselves, and then drinking. Ox, who’d joined the Parker band along with Andy, said, “I didn’t think the prom was such a drag. I thought it was fun.”

“If you thought that was a good job,” Andy said, “you should come along with me next week.”

“Yeah? What’s doing?”

“My uncle’s holding one of his balls,” Andy said.

“Oh, Andy,” Carol scolded, unable to keep back the giggle.

“I got a card from the Banner today,” Ox said, not having caught on to Andy’s gag.

“What does the old Arab have to say for himself?”

“They’re putting him in a band down in Miami. ComServPac or something. What does ComServPac mean?”

“That’s Latin for ‘To the victor belongs the spoils.’”

“Really?” Ox asked.

“Sure.”

“How do you like that?” Ox said, digesting the information. “But how come Tony gets put in a band, and Bud and Frank don’t? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Piano players and drummers are a dime a dozen.”

Ox nodded sadly. “So are sax men.”

“No, it’s not as bad with sax men. So they send Frank to quartermaster school, and they try to make Bud a signalman. That’s life.”

He waited for Ox to say, “What’s life?” but Ox didn’t. Ox merely kept nodding his head sadly.

Artie Parker was heading for the piano with a full fifth of Puerto Rican rum in his right hand. He uncorked the bottle, took a long swallow, and then began playing. Andy danced with Carol for a while, and when he heard a tenor sax join the piano, he picked up his trumpet case, took out his horn, and joined the session. They blew for fifteen minutes straight, blasting away at “One O’Clock Jump.” He lost himself while he played, knowing he sounded good, but wanting more than he was getting, and trying desperately to get that more, and thinking of other things while he blew, not consciously thinking of the music he was making.

He’d never really tried to pin-point how he’d got involved with the Long Island set, but he supposed it was because June Tambeau was Artie’s girl, and June was part of that set. Artie had met June at one of the dances they’d played, and the piano player had been whisked into the crowd, and one night June had asked Andy and Carol to come along to one of the parties, and that had been the beginning, he supposed.

He had to admit these kids knew how to have fun, a more sophisticated kind of fun than the old Tony Banner Boys had. Oh, sure, they did a lot of the same things — like going to Coney, things like that — but a lot of the other things they did were pretty damned different, and the Tony Banner Boys’ fun was sort of kid stuff in comparison. Like when the Tony Banner Boys drank, well, they usually drank beer, and beer was strictly for the sparrows in this new crowd. Whenever there was a party, the liquor flowed like wine, and there was good stuff too — stuff he’d learned was good — like Canadian Club and Haig & Haig pinch, and Gordon’s, and even milder stuff like Cherry Heering. And the things they did were more casual and more sophisticated, as if they didn’t have to try so hard to have fun, the fun was already there and all they had to do was pick it up and enjoy it. And they all had their own cars, not beat-up old rattletraps like Frank’s car, or like Bud’s father’s car. They drove convertibles or souped-up sedans, and one of the guys drove a red MG that positively knocked your eyes out. So the new crowd was a lot of fun, and he guessed he liked it a lot, even though he of course missed Bud. Naturally you’d miss your best friend. And this crowd all liked the way he blew that horn of his, and that suited him fine, and so he blasted away at the music, standing near the piano and listening to all the voices around him.

Artie drifted into “Summertime,” and Andy picked it up and began blowing, with the tenor sax giving him a nice hunk of harmony. It was winter outside, but inside that living room the magnolias began to open and their heady aroma wafted on the air, and the sky turned velvet black, and the moon turned big and orange, and you could smell freshly cut grass, and you could see little colored kids running over the fields barefoot, and you could hear watermelons popping open, juicy and red, and you could hear the sound of voices around a lake and the lazy whisper of leaves on countless budding trees. It was winter outside Buff Collier’s house, but the breeze inside was warm and sweet, captured in the bell of Andy’s horn, and the kids swayed with a dreamy look in their eyes, listening to the horn, caught in its golden mist, and they weren’t in suits and gowns any more, they were lounging around in tee shirts and shorts, lounging on the bank of a lake, watching a big summer sky and dreaming. And the biggest dreamer was Andy, standing there on top of the world with the clouds licking at his face, and the moon smiling, and the stars winking at him, and “Summertime” flowing from his lips and his fingers and his lungs — and his heart.

Artie modulated into a rumba, and then another slow ballad, and Andy rested, blowing a muted background for the tenor sax, and then Artie did “Smoke Rings,” along about which time June Tambeau discovered an unoccupied bedroom somewhere in the house. This was about two in the morning, and she yanked Artie away from the piano, and the band’s bass man, a kid named Fletcher Wright, took over the piano, and the session went strong for another half hour.

Along about three some of the kids decided it would be fun to set fire to the living-room drapes, and Buff Collier thought it would be grand kicks, too. They formed a ring around the drapes, all the kids holding soda squirt bottles, and Buff herself put the torch to the heavy velvet material, and it looked as if it weren’t going to catch for a minute, but then it did and the drape began burning up toward the ceiling, and everybody turned his squirt bottle on, and the fire was out as quickly as it had been ignited, with smoke pouring into the room and making everyone cough.

They opened all the windows, and since it was damned cold outside, it pretty soon got damned cold inside, and though they were still laughing over the sport of setting Ere to drapes, they began to realize that their ears were getting slightly frostbitten.

A girl named Alice suggested that they all go upstairs to the master bedroom and get some blankets, so they all started upstairs for the master bedroom and surprised a kid named Warren Dawes and another kid named Francine Billis (the girls all called her Bilious) in a somewhat compromising position. When Francine had put on her underwear again and pulled the blankets to her throat, the other kids piled into the bedroom, and a guy and a girl hopped into the bed Francine and Warren were sharing, and four other kids piled into the second twin bed, and the rest of the kids dropped to the rug-covered floor and smothered themselves with blankets.

A boy named Tommy Baretti thought it would be fun to set Ere to the thick rug, but Buff poked her head out from one of the blankets and shouted, “The hell you say!” and that put an end to that.

Bilious, in her bra and panties, with Warren against her on her right, and with a boy named Simmy behind her, felt very much in her element, and she shouted, “Why don’t we just shut up and enjoy ourselves,” which everybody thought was a damned good idea, and so everybody shut up and began enjoying themselves, and this wasn’t a very easy thing to do, the master bedroom being as packed as it was, nor was it a difficult thing to do, either. When the room was silent, they realized that some of the musicians were still downstairs playing, and one of the girls wrapped a blanket around herself and went down to see what sport was being offered in the living room. The other kids in the bedroom got a little bored with this goldfish-bowl group attitude and began drifting to other parts of the house. (There were five bedrooms with a total of ten beds, a den in which there were three foam-rubber sofas, a playroom with a very thick rug on its floor, a garage with a large, roomy-back-seat Cadillac, and a living room just overflowing with soft and inviting pieces of furniture.)

The musicians were in the living room, too — only three of them now — Andy, Fletcher, and the tenor man, a boy named Jonesy for no apparent reason other than that his last name was Jones.

Andy had had a good many Scotches and sodas by this time, and Carol had had just as many, and Fletcher had inherited the rum bottle Artie left at the piano, and so the music was more a labor of love than it was anything else. Carol drifted over to one of the couches, kicked off her shoes, and lay down full length, and it was several moments before Andy realized she was gone, and at the same time (it was only three-thirty) he realized he was tired. He yawned, and Jonesy, the tenor man, said, “What’s the matter, man? Sleepy?”

“Awm,” Andy said.

“You want to crack a benny?”

“What?”

“Keep you awake, man.”

“What the hell’s a benny?”

Jonesy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small tube. “Benzedrine inhaler.”

“I haven’t got a cold,” Andy said.

Jonesy chuckled. “You’re a card, man. Who says you need a cold?”

“That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? Says right here, ‘For relief of congested nasal pass—’”

“That’s the square definition, man. Here, dig this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pocketknife, which he unclasped. He stabbed the point of the blade into the container and then slit the container across the center, reaching in and pulling out a folded sheet of paper.

Andy saw a printed message on the sheet, and he asked, “What’s that say?”

“Business about not taking this internally. It’s for the birds, man. I’ve taken it a dozen times.”

“Taken what?” Andy asked.

“The paper. Here, chew on it and then swallow it.”

Andy looked at him curiously. “What are you, nuts or something?”

“Go ahead. Keep you awake. Give you a little bounce.”

“Come down, man,” Andy said.

“I’m serious,” Jonesy said, his eyes widening. “Go on, take it.”

“You want me to chew that paper? Do I look like a goat?”

“All right, don’t chew it. Just wash it down with something, that’s all. Go ahead.”

Andy eyed the Benzedrine-soaked paper skeptically. “That’s too big to swallow,” he said.

Jonesy tore the sheet in half, and then half again, and then he wadded the torn paper into balls. “Here,” he said. “Just like pills.”

“I don’t know,” Andy said hesitantly.

“Come on, come on, for Christ’s sake.”

Andy shrugged, took one of the paper balls, and then washed it down with his drink.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said.

“You will. Here, take the rest.”

Andy washed down the remaining paper pills and then waited for something to happen. “I still don’t feel anything.”

“Give it time. It’s got to hit your blood.”

“You sure I won’t get sick?”

“On bennies? Get off that, man, will you?” Jonesy scoffed.

“Well, I still don’t feel anything.”

“You will. It’ll get you.”

“What am I supposed to feel?”

“Nothing much. Just hops you up, that’s all.”

“Hops me up how?” He was beginning to feel a little frightened now, wishing he had read the printed warning and suspecting he had swallowed something poisonous.

“Makes you jump, man,” Jonesy said, laughing. “You’ll see.”

He began to feel it in a little while, a sort of hypertension that surged through his body, a sort of forced energy, a pseudo-drive.

“It’s getting you, huh, man?” Jonesy asked.

“Yeah, I feel it now,” Andy said. “What the hell is that stuff, anyway?”

“Benzedrine, I told you. Harmless. But it’ll keep you awake, you can bet on that.”

“Man, it really charges you up, doesn’t it?”

He felt suddenly restless, as if he had a million things to do and had to get them done instantly. He rested his horn on the piano top, started to walk away, and then thought better of it. After what he’d seen done to the drapes (how the hell would Buff explain that to her folks? A careless cigarette?) he couldn’t trust his horn alone. He walked quickly back to the piano, took his horn again, and then put it back into his case. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he locked the case. He looked around for Carol then, still feeling this restless pounding inside him, his head suddenly crystal clear, his entire nervous system all jazzed up.

He spotted her on the couch in the corner, and he walked to it, his steps curiously perky, his eyes bright. He turned off the light behind the couch, plunging the corner into darkness.

“Carol,” he whispered.

“Mmmm?”

“Are you asleep?”

“Norn.”

“Carol?”

“Mmm?”

“Carol?”

“Mmm, whuzzit?”

“Are you asleep?”

“Mmmm.”

“Honey?”

“Mmm?”

“Honey, can you hear me?”

“Yezzufcuss.”

“You’re pretty as hell, do you know that?”

“Om.”

“You’re the prettiest girl here tonight.”

“Nkyou.”

“Carol?”

“Mmm?”

“Why don’t we go upstairs?”

“Whufor?”

“You know.”

“Okaysurefine.”

“You’ll go?”

“Huhwhere?”

“Upstairs?”

“Nub. Stayhere.”

It was very dark in the corner. He lifted the hem of her gown, pulling it up over her knees.

“Carol,” he whispered hoarsely.

She was very warm beneath the gown. She stirred, and then suddenly sat bolt upright, her eyes staring wide.

“What?” she said.

He did not move his hand. He kissed her, and she returned his kiss sleepily, and only then did she become aware of what he was doing. Her own hand swooped down like a hawk, and he felt her fingernails gouge into his wrist.

“Stop!” she said.

“Carol—”

“Andy stop it this minute.”

“Carol, for Pete’s sake—”

“What’s the matter with you, Andy? My God, what’s the matter with you? All these people—”

“We can go upstairs.”

“No.”

“Carol—”

“I said no.”

“Everybody else—”

“I don’t care about everybody else. I can wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Until we’re married.”

“Married? Jesus, that won’t be for years.”

“Then it won’t be for years. I still can wait.”

“Jesus, Carol. Sometimes—”

“Sometimes what?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, then kiss me and shut up. And be a good boy.”

He kissed her, and she guided his hand to the bodice of her gown, and then to the naked flesh of her breast, as if she and he had made a tacit agreement that this was as far as it should go, and no farther.

From upstairs, Buff Collier yelled, “Hey, is anybody awake at this damn party?”

He didn’t have his brush with the cops until almost a month later. The boys were coming back from a late wedding job they’d played in the Bronx, and Artie drove his car down East New York Avenue at close to sixty miles an hour. The streets of Brooklyn were deserted at that early hour of the morning, and the boys talked very little, exhausted from a full night of music-making.

Andy was sleepy as hell. He had taken a benny during the job, but that had only charged him up for a little while, and he was wondering now if he shouldn’t swallow the remaining half of the drug-soaked paper. He had learned after a while that only half of the paper was necessary to hop him up. He also had a sneaking hunch that it was illegal to break open the inhaler and use the paper. He had casually ignored all this because he couldn’t possibly figure any way for anyone ever to find out what he was doing. Besides, everything seemed to be going along just dandy for him these days. He’d auditioned with a semi-big-time outfit led by a man named Jerry Black, and the Black band was leaving for a Midwestern tour at the beginning of April, and that gave him more than enough time to arrange for quitting school and getting everything in order. Carol had objected to his quitting school and taking the job, but he’d talked her out of that, and Artie had been real decent about all of it, wishing him luck and all that sort of garbage, but telling him he hoped Andy would still play with the band until it was time to leave. Andy, of course, was very happy to do that. He still had a month before leaving, and the jobs with Artie gave him spending money. And as for the Benzedrine, well, what harm did it do, provided no one ever found out about it?

So he sat in the back of the car on that March night alongside the bass drum with a cracked inhaler in his pocket and one half of the Benzedrine-soaked paper stuffed back into the inhaler, and he wondered whether he should take the other half, but he decided against it since he’d be home and asleep in a very few minutes, as soon as Artie got his goddamned gas.

Artie did not spot the green Hudson sedan that pulled out onto East New York Avenue where East Ninety-fifth Street crossed it. There were five men in that sedan. Artie had his mind on his early Sunday date with June Tambeau, and Artie wanted to gas up the car tonight so that he could sleep later tomorrow morning. Jonesy and Tack, the other occupants of the car, were oblivious to everything. They didn’t even blink when Artie made a screeching turn on Utica Avenue and braked to a wild stop inside the gas station.

The green Hudson sedan crashed the red light on the corner of Utica, made a sweeping left turn, and then pulled into the gas station directly in front of Artie’s car. The four doors of the sedan Hew open. Three men in sports jackets piled out of the back seat, and two men in business suits spilled out of the front seat.

The five men quickly stationed themselves around Artie’s car. Two stood directly in front of it. One went to the rear, another went to the right-hand side of the car, and the fifth man came to the door near the driver’s seat and yelled, “Get out!”

Andy’s first impression was that he was about to be held up. The five men surrounding the car were all six-footers, all mean-looking bastards. He wondered idly why they’d pull a holdup in a lighted gas station, but then he considered the fourteen dollars he had in his pocket, his payment for the night’s work, and he dismissed the logic or lack of logic and concerned himself only with the possible loss.

“Get out of that car!” the man yelled again, and Artie stared at him and then, idiotically, took the key from the ignition, as if that would have prevented the theft of the car.

“Wha... who... who...?” he stammered, and the man yelled, “Come on, move!”

Artie didn’t move. Beside him Tack Tacconi was visibly trembling, as if he were taking a wild snare drum solo. On the back seat Jonesy sat white faced on his side of the bass drum, and Andy sat on the other side, furiously considering a way of hiding the fourteen bucks.

“You hear me?” the man shouted.

“I... I...”

“Get the hell out of that car!”

Artie, through frozen fright or stubborn obstinacy, did not move. The man clasped a hairy paw on the door handle, pried it open, and then reached inside for Artie’s collar. Artie was not a heavy boy, but even if he were heavy, he’d have been no match for the giant who lifted him bodily from the car.

“Hey!” Artie shouted, and then he was being slammed up against one of the gasoline pumps, and the man said, “Let me see your license!”

“Who—”

“Police,” the man said tersely. “Let me see your license.”

For some strange reason, Artie didn’t believe the man was a cop. He was wearing a sports jacket, wasn’t he? He was driving a green car, wasn’t he? No, this was just a trick. This thug just wanted Artie to hand over his wallet, that was all.

“Let... let me see your badge,” he said bravely.

“Let me see your license,” the man insisted.

“Let me see your badge,” Artie insisted back, pinned to the gasoline pump, and then, apparently realizing the folly of his insistence, he moved one hand up toward his inside jacket pocket, moving to reach his wallet and his license.

The man’s hand dropped from Artie’s collar instantly. It moved so fast that Artie didn’t know what was happening for a moment, and then it snapped into view again, and the fingers were curled around the butt of a .38 Police Special.

Artie’s eyes almost popped out of his head.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, Jesus, what... I was only going for my license... I was only...”

“Let’s have it,” the man said, holding the gun at an angle so that it was pointed up at Artie’s head.

Artie took out his wallet, flipped it open, and handed it to the man.

“Take out the license,” the man said.

“Are... are you a cop?”

“What the hell do you think I am?” The man reached into one of his pockets with his free hand, Hipped open a wallet, and showed Artie a quick glimpse of a silver shield.

“I’m... I’m sorry, officer,” Artie said. “I didn’t realize... I thought...”

The cop took the extended license, and sitting in the back seat Andy felt first a wave of relief, and then a wave of terror. He was carrying a cracked Benzedrine inhaler in his jacket! Suppose he was searched... suppose...

The cop examined the license and then bellowed, “All light, everybody out of the car.” Tack Tacconi came out of the car first, and the cop on his side frisked him quickly and then told him to stand over near the gas pump with Artie. They put Jonesy through the same routine, and then Andy came off the back seat, and one of the cops ran his hands over Andy’s pockets quickly, and he prayed the cop would not feel the inhaler, and he felt the sweat pop out on his brow.

“Whose car is this?” the first cop asked.

“M... mmm... mine,” Artie said.

“You got the registration?”

“In the glove compartment.”

“Check that, Fred,” the first detective said, and the cop on the other side of the car climbed in and thumbed open the glove compartment. He found the registration and handed it to the first cop, and then he began tossing everything out of the glove compartment, letters, a flashlight, a couple of road maps, a tire repair kit, even a tube of June Tambeau’s lipstick.

“Nothing here,” he said, colossally understating the amount of garbage he’d taken from the compartment.

“Open the trunk,” the first cop told Artie.

“The... the trunk?”

“You heard me.”

Artie went back to the trunk and opened it. The cops all gathered around him like betters in a floating crap game. The first cop pointed into the trunk.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“What’s... what’s what?” Artie asked.

“That,” the cop said, still pointing.

“My... my radio, officer.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“I... I bought it. Naturally.”

“You bought it, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

The cop named Fred was in the back seat now. He put the bass drum out of the car, shoved the seat onto the floor, and then felt under the seat, probing with a flashlight.

“Whose drum is this?” he asked.

“Mine,” Tack answered.

“Wh... what are you looking for, officers?” Artie asked politely.

“What the hell were you doing barreling down the avenue at sixty miles an hour?” the first cop asked.

“We just wanted to get home. We’re musicians.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Better shake them down once more,” the first cop said.

Standing near the rear wheel of the car, Andy felt the terror stab deep within him once again. He reached into his jacket pocket casually, his fingers tightening around the cracked inhaler. If I just get out of this, he vowed, if you just get me out of this one, I’ll never do it again. I swear, never again.

He slid his hand out of his pocket, his fingers sweating. Fred was making a methodical search of Tack’s pockets now, turning them inside out. The other cops were giving Jonesy and Artie the same treatment. Andy could feel his heart thudding against his rib case. He wet his lips, and he felt a sour taste in his mouth, and he hoped he wouldn’t get sick. He put his hand against his trouser leg, and then he opened the fingers slowly, and he felt the inhaler slip free, and he realized it would clatter when it hit the pavement, and so he began coughing wildly, moving away from the rear wheel, covering the sound of the inhaler hitting. He did not look down at the ground. He moved away from the wheel, and Fred barked, “Where the hell you going, kid?”

Somehow he found his voice. “Just... just stretching my legs,” he said tightly.

“Come here,” Fred said.

Andy went to him, and the cop began going through his pockets methodically, finding nothing. Andy still did not look back to where he’d dropped the inhaler.

“All right,” the first cop said, “where the hell were you headed, doing sixty miles an hour?”

“I didn’t know we were going that fast, officer,” Artie said. His father had taught him that the only way to handle a cop was to butter him up, calling him “officer” and “sir” at every turn of the conversation.

“You were going that fast,” the cop said. “Where the hell were you going?”

“Just to get some gas, sir, and then home.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At four in the morning?”

“We’re musicians, officer. We’re just coming home from a wedding job in the Bronx.” He paused. “An Irish wedding,” he added shrewdly.

“Yeah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mmmm,” the cop said.

“I guess they’re clean,” Fred said.

“I’ll give you some information,” the first cop said to Artie, “and I hope you listen to it. In the first place, speed limits are in force twenty-four hours a day. I don’t give a damn what time you’re coming home, the speed limit applies, you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when a cop asks you for your license, you give it to him damn fast, you understand that?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t know you were an officer, sir.”

“What the hell did you think I was?”

“I thought you were a holdup man, sir.”

“And I thought you were the same thing, and I almost put a hole in your head when you made a sudden reach for your pocket. So don’t ever do that again, either, you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now get this goddamn car off the streets and consider yourself lucky. You seem like a nice bunch of kids, so we’ll let it pass this time. We could haul you in for speeding, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, and I certainly appreciate—”

“All right, get moving.”

“I’d... I’d like to get some gas, sir. If it’s all right.”

“Go ahead, get your gas.”

The cops piled back into the green Hudson sedan and gunned away from the gas station. The attendant came over, his eyes wide.

“Jesus,” he said, “what the hell was that?”

“Those miserable bastards,” Artie said.

“Man, I was scared stiff,” Tack said.

Jonesy’s face was still white, and his hands were shaking. “Did you see the size of them?” he asked.

“Those miserable bastards,” Artie said.

“Man, I thought they were going to... man, when I saw him pull that gun on you... oh, man... man, I thought I’d... Jesus, I thought I’d drop dead.”

Artie smiled. “Those miserable bastards. Thinking we were crooks.”

“You can’t blame them,” Tack said. “Shooting up the avenue at—”

“You want gas?” the attendant asked.

“Fill ’er up,” Artie said. “How you feel, Andy?”

Andy gulped. “Okay,” he said.

“Hey, dig Andy,” Artie said. “Man, you look like you’re ready to pass out.”

“I’m just a little... a little shaken,” Andy said.

“You’ll be lucky to get out of this burg. Man, I wish I was goin’ on the road.”

“How about some coffee before we go home?” Tack asked. “Man, I can sure use a cup.”

“Good idea. What do you say, Andy?”

“All right,” Andy said.

“We can go to the White Tower on Remsen and Utica,” Artie said. “Those miserable bastards.”

They stood around while the attendant filled the tank, silent now, glad the episode was over. Artie paid the attendant, and they climbed back into the car. Andy hesitated a moment. He looked down to the patch of concrete near the right rear wheel. He saw the cracked inhaler nestling against the rubber of the tire. He wet his lips, staring at the inhaler.

“You coming, Andy?” Tack said.

“Yes,” he said.

He opened the back door and then stooped quickly, his fingers closing around the inhaler tube. He put the tube into his pocket and then climbed into the car.

“I’m ready,” he said.

20

change of key, ii

MAY-JULY, 1945

Lying on his bed in the hotel room, Andy could hear the sounds of Michigan Avenue far below him, filtering up to and through the open window. It was still raining, but the wind was blowing from the opposite direction, and so the sharp silvery wet needles slanted away from the window and the room.

Rain in a strange town was a very depressing thing somehow. He wondered why this should be so, and then he picked up Bud’s letter again and began reading from the second page.

...big-time outfit, so I guess you’re really in your element now. I always knew you would amount to something, and I think you did the wise thing in grabbing the opportunity when it came along. In her letters Carol tells me she didn’t think you should’ve quit school, but the decision was yours to make, really, and your first responsibility is to yourself, isn’t it? Anyway, you’ve been with Black for some months now, so I guess it must appeal to you.

The navy certainly appeals to me. I know there are a lot of guys who find it chicken, but I love it. I guess it’s hard to explain, but I like them telling me when to wake up, and when to go to sleep, and when you can leave the ship, and when you have to be back aboard, and they feed you when they want to feed you, and they tell you what to wear, and that all sounds kind of lousy when you say it that way, but I like it.

You don’t have to worry about a damn thing. Do you know what I mean? All the decisions are made for you. You don’t have to worry about anyone but yourself. When you think of it, you don’t even have to worry about yourself.

There are officers paid to do the worrying. Jesus, it’s a great life. I’ll tell you the truth, I’ll be a little sorry when it’s all over. I mean, when I have to come back and pick up where I left off. Not that I don’t want to be back with the old crowd — hell, there was nothing like the old crowd — but, well, I guess this is beginning to sound crazy, so the hell with it.

I understand they’ve shipped Frank to Okinawa where he...

Andy folded the letter and put it on the night table. He was happy that Bud was enjoying himself because he couldn’t exactly say he was doing the same. It was strange, too, because he sure as hell should have been enjoying himself, but he wasn’t, and that was the simple truth of it. He missed Carol, and he missed Bud. It was funny he should miss them and not his own mother and father, but he had to admit that was the way things stood.

Then, too, the band was boring him a lot lately.

There was a dull regularity to the routine of traveling with a big band. Breakfast at noon, rehearsals at two, a movie to kill the rest of the afternoon, or a few drinks in a bar; a late supper, and then onto the bandstand until two in the morning; a sandwich with the boys, and then bed. This would have been all right, he supposed, if he were enjoying the bandstand part, and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t.

It was just that... well, hell, what was the reason now? Why the hell wasn’t he really blowing the way he wanted to blow now? He had a big-time section behind him, and he had big-time arrangements, and, Jesus, Jesus, he certainly gave it everything he had, didn’t he? He blew his lungs out, and his heart out, and still something eluded him, and he kept grasping for it, not even knowing what the something was, only knowing that the sound wasn’t the right sound — good, yes, but not what he wanted. And because it was not what he wanted, he sought excitement, and because the excitement could never compare to this thing he wanted to achieve with his horn, he found only boredom instead.

There were ways to break the monotony, of course — the jam sessions in the all-night bistros, where musicians from every band in town congregated after hours to blow their heads off. He’d blown with Barney Bigard at one of those sessions, and Art Tatum had given him a piano background at another. He had felt excitement on those nights, blowing with the greats, and then the excitement had died — in spite of the wild applause that greeted him — because again he’d felt this empty longing, this desire to give his horn a tongue, to make his horn speak from hidden wells within him.

He had enjoyed his freedom, too, at first. No mother or father to watch him, no well-meant words about what time to get in, none of his mother’s fussing over him, and none of his father’s tacit disapproval of everything he did. He had enjoyed this feeling of independence immensely, until even that wore off, leaving him only a lot of empty time on his hands.

He had tried to fill that time practicing, thinking, I will get it if I practice, I will find my horn, really find my horn. But he did not find what he wanted, and so he spent the afternoons shopping instead, using a large part of his salary on new clothes — clothes Bud would have beamed over. He’d bought two new sports jackets and some crazy argyles in Marshall Field’s, and then he’d drifted over to the college shops and gone to hell with himself there. He chose his clothes carefully, and he never bought cheap stuff, and there was excitement in his early buying sprees — until his wardrobe was stocked. He bought a few items after that, but he knew he was buying aimlessly, and the joy was lacking now, and so he stopped it.

On a day like this he supposed he should practice. Jerry had called off the rehearsal because the new arrangements weren’t ready, and that gave him a long afternoon to piddle with. But the thought of another unrewarding session alone with the horn filled him with an almost physical paralysis. And so he lay on the bed, feeling a strange need within him and knowing of no way to satisfy it.

When Dick MacGregor came into the room, Andy was neither pleased nor displeased. MacGregor was on first trombone. He was a good man, a big man with a freckle-spattered face and sparkling green eyes. Andy and he shared a kidding relationship, a relationship in which Andy’s exclusive line of banter centered around the fact that all you needed in order to be a trombone player was a pair of lungs and a long arm. MacGregor’s arms were long and, coupled with his wide paunch and beer-barrel stature, they gave him the appearance of an extremely intelligent, jovial orangutan.

MacGregor closed the door behind him and then went to sit by the window. Andy did not move from the bed.

“You goofing?” MacGregor asked.

“Mmm,” Andy said.

“Man, this rain is the eeriest,” MacGregor said, peering through the window.

“How so?”

“The eeriest dreariest, man,” MacGregor said, shaking his head. “Makes you want to crawl in somebody’s basement and hide there.”

“To each his own,” Andy said.

“We could’ve used a rehearsal today,” MacGregor said. “Hey, you dig the two broads moved in down the hall?”

“No,” Andy said.

“Acrobats or something. At one of the clubs. They’re built like lace-pantied tennis players. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Andy said.

“Nice rippling muscles on their calves and thighs. I go for that muscular type.”

“I understand there’s a wrestling match tonight at—”

“Don’t be wise,” MacGregor said.

“Only offering a suggestion,” Andy said, smiling.

MacGregor stared through the window. “Want to go down the hall and see it we can con them into a drink?”

“I’m too tired,” Andy said.

“Yeah. Man, this rain sure is a drag, ain’t it?”

“It sure is.”

“It’s blacker’n a satchel full of bowling balls out there,” MacGregor said.

“Yeah,” Andy said.

“Hey, are you holding?” MacGregor said suddenly.

“Am I what?”

“You got any junk?”

“What do you mean, junk?”

“Oh, come down,” MacGregor said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andy answered.

“I got some in my room, anyway. I mean, I’m not hitting you up for a free ride.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Andy said.

“Mootah,” MacGregor said.

“That explains it, all right. What’s mootah?”

“Oh, come on, man, you’re dusting me.”

“I kid you not,” Andy said. “What’s mootah?”

“The kid’s from Squaresville,” MacGregor said to the open window. “Let it drop.”

“Okay,” Andy agreed. “Let it drop.”

The room was silent for several moments. MacGregor kept staring through the open window at the curtain of rain outside.

“The bleariest, dreariest,” MacGregor said. “Hey, you see that new movie at the State Lake?”

“No.”

“You want to drift over there this afternoon?”

“Not particularly.”

“Supposed to be a good show.”

“Maybe later,” Andy said.

“Yeah, okay,” MacGregor watched the rain. “Real muscular calves and thighs. They look like stuff, too. I’ve got a fifth in my room. You want to give it a swing?”

“I haven’t got the energy.”

“Well, what the hell you gonna do, man? Sit on your butt all day long?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Just be careful they don’t mistake you for dead and start shovelin’ dirt all over you.”

“I read a book about a guy who got buried alive once,” Andy said. “It was called Vendetta. You ever read that one?”

“I ain’t much of a reader,” MacGregor said. “Is it in a pocket book yet?”

“I don’t think so. I got it from the library.”

“I only buy pocket books. I ain’t been to the library since I was twelve.”

“We used to go to the library a lot when I was back home. It was a kind of a meeting place.”

“We met at the poolroom,” MacGregor said.

“I mean with chicks,” Andy said.

“The chicks we knew all played pool.”

“Sounds like a gone crowd.”

“We had our kicks. Anyway, I don’t read much. Two things I read religiously are the first-trombone sheet and Down Beat.”

“You’re in a rut, man.”

“Sure, but it’s comfy. Listen, we going to sit around here and gas, we’re gonna need a little refreshment.”

“I got a jug here, if you want some.”

“Who’s talking about juice? Man, for a cat who blows the way you do, you sure are nowhere.”

“You mean the chicks?”

“I saw one of them in the hall the other day in a leotard. One of those black things that hug—”

“I know what a leotard is.”

“I wasn’t sure, man, not the way you’ve been talking. I’ll be right back.”

“You going for the chicks?”

“You said you were tired, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So why should I go for the chicks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Man, you’re in a fog, you know that? I wouldn’t be surprised you’re turned on already.”

“What?”

“Cool it, man. As Mac Arthur once said, ‘I shall return.’”

Andy watched him leave without replying. He could hear the swish of the rain outside, and beneath that the steady hum of the traffic. The ceiling bored him to tears, and he sat at the nucleus of his boredom and examined it like a man with a duplicate of a rare stamp.

When MacGregor came back into the room, he did not look up.

“You asleep?” MacGregor asked.

“No.”

“Gone. Try some of this, man.”

“Some of what?” He propped himself up on his elbows. MacGregor was extending a cigarette to him. “I don’t smoke,” Andy said.

“You’re a clown, daddy,” MacGregor said. “Who’s asking you to smoke?”

“That’s a cigarette, isn’t it?”

“That’s a reefer,” MacGregor said.

Andy stared at the long, cylindrical tube. “Yeah?”

“Go ahead. Take it.”

“What for?”

“Kill the afternoon. What the hell?”

“The afternoon’s dead already,” Andy said.

“This’ll give it a boot in the back. Come on.”

“Nah,” Andy said.

“Come on, man. Hey, what’s bugging you, anyway? You act like this is poison. Half the cats on this band are hip to M.”

“What the hell is M?”

“Mootah, muggles, miggles, hemp, hashish, bhang, tea, pot, weed, Rosa Maria, Mary Warner, take your choice. It’s all marijuana. Come on, man, it never hurt a fly.”

“Yeah, but does it hurt humans?”

“You’re a real clown, daddy. You want this, or nay?”

“I’ll pass it this time.”

“Whatever you say. You mind if I blast?”

“Do what you want to,” Andy said.

“You never really lit a stick, Andy?”

“Never.”

“Man, you haven’t lived. Well, here’s how.”

Andy watched as MacGregor put the long thin cigarette to his lips. He struck a match and lit it quickly, and then he cupped his hands around it, as if he were unwilling to allow any of the smoke to escape. He took a long, sucking drag on it, air rushing into his mouth around the corners of the cigarette. He did not stop inhaling. He kept sucking repeatedly on the reefer until it was barely a half-inch long.

“There’s more power when it’s down to a roach,” MacGregor said. “You get it all concentrated down around here.” He held the stub between two fingers now, his thumb and forefinger clamped on the white paper close to the burning coal. He sucked in deeply, and the cigarette burned close to his fingers, and still he sucked, until there was almost only the burning coal left in his hand. He dropped the coal into an ash tray then, and it burned out almost instantly.

Andy watched him, and he noticed no appreciable change, except that a small smile suddenly appeared on MacGregor’s mouth. His eyes were very bright, and he studied Andy with calm aloofness, as if he knew a joke and would not reveal it.

“Ah, man,” he said contentedly, “that is the end, the ever-loving end.”

“Yeah,” Andy said blankly.

“Come on, man, try one.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, man, the atmosphere is rarefied up here. Oh, man, this is the unholiest. Come on, daddy, bust a joint with old Dickie-boy. Here goes, daddy, here goes now, oh, man, I’m walking on the walls. Take it.” He held out the second reefer. “Take it.”

“No.”

“Your choice, daddy, but oh, is that rain sweet now, oh, is that rain playing our song? Oh, daddy, listen to that sweet, stinking rain, oh, listen to it, man.”

“What does it feel like? I mean, smoking that?”

“Like nothing ever, man. Like everything. Like strawberry shortcake, like Rita Hayworth in a black nightgown. Oh, daddy, it’s the end of the world!”

“Does it make you sick? Like... like a benny sometimes makes you sick?”

“Benny? A benny? Oh, man, that’s as bad as getting high on juice. Take the stick. Blast, daddy. Come up here with me.”

Andy took the cigarette. It was a fragile thing, and he could hear the crackling of the marijuana beneath the thin paper covering.

“Does it make you sick?” Andy asked again.

“It makes you slick-sick, stick-sick, like when you’re sick with wanting a girl, oh, daddy don’t talk so friggin’ much, just light up and join the marching camels, join the caravan, dad, here come the dancing girls in their pantaloons!”

Andy put the cigarette between his lips, and then he struck a match.

“Inhale it straight down,” MacGregor said. “One continuous draw. Suck in all you can, and keep sucking, ’cause it burns like a bitch and before you know it, it’s all gone. Grab it while you’ve got it.”

He lit the cigarette and then sucked in the harsh smoke, feeling it attack his throat, feeling nothing else but the burning sensation.

“Keep at it, man! Drag! Drag!”

He kept dragging at the reefer, the smoke still harsh, smelling the sickly-sweet aroma of it as it attacked his nostrils, feeling a quickening of his pulse, which he attributed to the excitement of the situation. He sucked it down to a burning coal, the way MacGregor had done, and the last few drags were strong and potently heady, and when he dropped the coal into the ash tray, he leaned back and waited for something to happen.

He began giggling suddenly.

“What is it, dad?”

“Nothing,” Andy said, giggling. “It’s just... it don’t affect me.”

“It don’t, huh?”

“Not at all.” He was laughing uproariously, unable to control the gales of laughter. “It... not at all, at all, at all.”

The ceiling was spinning, and he watched the spinning, and he heard the gentle hush of rain outside, and he smiled down from away up there where he was, oh, how tall he was, he smiled down at MacGregor, and he was allwise and allpowerful and allseeing, and in his majestic splendor he waved his hand limply and said, “Bring on the dancing girls, knave,” and then he collapsed into laughter again, and the laughter sounded as if it were coming from someplace far, far below him, all the way down there, my God, so far down there, and he was all the way up somewhere on top of a mountain, and the air was so very sweet, and he tried to remember what it was that he had been bored about before, but he didn’t feel bored any more, he felt only superior to everything around him, including MacGregor, what was that fat slob doing in his room, anyway?

“You’re a fat slob, MacGregor,” he said, and MacGregor began laughing.

“It’s the end, ain’t it?”

“It’s the living end,” Andy said. “Goddamn, it’s the living end!”

In the beginning he knew it was wrong.

He knew damn well it was wrong, and so he steered away from MacGregor, and he tried to pretend that afternoon in his room had never happened. But he could not forget the feeling he’d had once the mootah had snapped the top of his wig. He could not forget that feeling, and there was no other way of getting that feeling because alcohol made you high, but it also made you stupid — and marijuana did not make you stupid. Marijuana made you very smart, very wise.

There was no substitute for marijuana. He went back to the Benzedrine, but, hell, that was nothing at all. All it did was give you a nervous jag, all it did was make you jumpy and hypertense. Marijuana didn’t do that at all. Marijuana smoothed the ruffled feathers. Marijuana was like a big mound of breasts you just put your head on. Marijuana was floating.

But even remembering the floating he knew it was bad, and so he steered away from MacGregor, but that didn’t help at all. His second stick of M came from the drummer on the band, a cat named Bash Bellew. He didn’t know why he took the stick, except that it wasn’t connected with MacGregor, and that somehow took the onus off it.

After that, and still knowing it was wrong, he blasted regularly. There was always one guy who was holding, and when you couldn’t find that guy, the Man was always on the scene. He got so he could spot the Man instantly. A different man each time, but he always bore the unmistakable stamp of the Man, and you always knew he was around, and for half a buck, you could spin your own disk, play your own tune, leave the ants and start floating.

Fifty cents a joint, and what was half a buck to a guy pulling down a bill a week? Three joints a day, that made it a buck and a half a day, ten-fifty a week. What was ten-fifty to a guy who’d already bought all the ties and socks he needed?

And it wasn’t habit-forming — that was the best part of it. The thing could be dropped tomorrow, and that would be the end of it. Dropped cold, with no aftereffects. So if it wasn’t habit-forming, and if even the big medical men didn’t know a hell of a lot about it, why not?

Why not, but at the same time, why?

Why indeed?

Well, why not, if it definitely is not habit-forming, and if it helps break the monotony, and if it doesn’t cost too much, and if the Man is always on the scene ready to oblige, and if you could blast in your own hotel room with nobody to bother you, with no cops snooping around or even suspecting, why in hell not?

And suppose it did take two joints after a while to bring on any sort of a charge, so what did that have to do with it? What the hell was a buck when you got right down to it? You got two shots of whisky for a buck, and that left you a long way from being stoned, and with this buck, this buck spent on M, you were guaranteed a charge, so wasn’t it worth it? And wasn’t it better than mooning around over Carol, or remembering Helen’s body? Wasn’t this, when you really grappled with the situation, a hell of a lot better than all of that? And it didn’t hurt the playing any, did it? Made it better somehow, made you sharper and cleaner, and all around better.

So why not?

Well, it’s wrong, for one thing.

How is it wrong?

It’s against the law.

Only if you’re caught with the stuff.

You can go to jail. You can get up to ten years for...

If the breaks are against you, you can go to jail for almost anything. Hell, if you falsify your income tax...

This isn’t income tax. This is fooling around with DRUGS.

Who said marijuana is a drug?

Well...

Is it habit-forming?

Well, no, not exactly.

Then why is it wrong?

Because it’s a bad habit.

You just said it wasn’t a habit.

It’s a voluntary habit — all right? And it’s bad because... well, what happens when you build a tolerance to it? What happens when you no longer get a boot from it? Where do you go then? What do you try next?

Man, your arguments are all wet.

No, Andy, they’re not. You know that.

I know nothing. You haven’t told me a goddamn thing.

It’s wrong, Andy. It’s wrong, and you know it is, and you can he to me, maybe, but you sure as hell can’t lie to yourself.

He knew it was wrong in the beginning, and he still knew it after the taking of a reefer had become a “voluntarily” habitual thing, like brushing his teeth. He knew it was wrong, and the knowledge plagued him, but he could see no way of escaping the boys on the band, or the Man who was always there. If a lot of them did it, if they insisted on clinging to him, clinging to him fiercely, their fingers tight and grasping, what could he do, what could he possibly do?

He could run! To Bud. Bud would know... but Bud was away.

Run, run! To Helen then, Helen... no, what was he thinking? Carol. Of course, Carol.

When Jerry Black told him the band was moving on to Cincinnati the following week, he handed in his notice. Jerry was stunned because he hadn’t suspected anything was troubling Andy. He tried to talk him out of it, but Andy was adamant. He wanted to go home. He wanted to be back with the people he knew and needed. That was all there was to it. The band left Chicago on a Tuesday night in July, and Andy caught the midnight plane for New York at the same time.

He went to see Carol the next morning. She cried when she saw him, and she held him close, as if she never wanted him to leave the circle of her arms, and he was sure then that he’d made the right decision in leaving Jerry Black.

They went out that night, the spark of the reunion having been replaced by a warm intimacy. They talked of what they’d each done in their separation, and then Carol asked, “Why’d you leave the band, Andy?”

“Just like that,” he said, not wanting to tell her about his infatuation with marijuana.

“Didn’t you like the fellows?”

“They were fine.”

“What then?”

“Nothing. I just decided to come home, that’s all. I missed you.”

“Did you get along with everyone?”

“Oh, sure.”

“He didn’t take any solos away from you, or anything like that?”

“No.”

“Then why did you leave?”

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t tell me.”

“I... I was bored, Carol.”

“Bored?”

“Yes. I... I just decided to come home.”

“And what’ll you do now?”

“Find another job, I guess.”

“Playing?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Why, of course, playing. What else would I do?”

“Then why didn’t you stay with Black?”

“I told you. I was bored.”

“What makes you think you won’t be bored on another band?”

“Well, I won’t know until I try it, will I?”

“You shouldn’t have come home, Andy.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say,” he said, annoyed.

“I’m glad you’re back, darling. You know that. But... I don’t think it’s good to jump from one band to another.”

“Hell, musicians change their bands as often as they change their underwear.”

“But you should have stuck with it, Andy. Until you were ready for a move.”

“I’m ready now.”

“I hope so.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I just hope you’re ready, Andy. You did leave a good job, didn’t you? There was no reason—”

“There was a damn good reason,” he snapped.

“If there was, I haven’t heard it yet.”

“I’ve told you six times already. I was bored with the band.”

“Will it be any different on another band?”

“You’ve already asked me that. What is this, anyway, Carol? You certainly don’t act very damn glad to see me.”

“I am, you know that. It’s just—”

“Well, you don’t act it. The way you talk, I could have stayed in Chicago for the rest of my life, and you wouldn’t have given a good goddamn.”

“I’m sorry I gave you that impression.”

“I’m sorry, too. Believe me.”

They fell into a heavy silence.

“There was a good reason for leaving,” he said.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she answered, still not believing him.

“Come on, let’s go home. We’ll make a fresh start tomorrow.”

“All right. If you say so.”

“Well, we’re certainly not getting anyplace tonight, are we?”

“It doesn’t seem so.”

“I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, Carol.”

“Nothing.”

“Then why’ve you been giving me the business?”

“Because it was your idea to leave school, and I said no, and now you’ve left what turned out to be a good job, that’s why. Now please take me home because I don’t feel like arguing any more.”

“Sure.”

“Sure,” she repeated.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” he said.

“I certainly hope so. And maybe you’ll see what a fool you’ve been in the morning.”

“I doubt it.”

They went home in a sullen, uncommunicative mood. On her doorstep he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow, Carol.”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

She went into the house without kissing him, and he stood on the front step for a long time, annoyed with her lack of understanding, and annoyed with his own temper.

He looked at his watch. It was only eleven-fifteen. What the hell kind of time was that to be coming home? Jesus, why couldn’t she understand? Couldn’t anyone ever understand him?

He walked down to Eastern Parkway and stopped in a candy store. He went to the phone booth on impulse, looked up a number, and then dialed it rapidly.

“Hello?” the voice said.

“Helen?”

“Yes.”

“This is Andy.”

“Who?”

“Andy Silvera. You know, Andy...”

“Oh. Oh, yes.” There was a long pause. “What is it, Andy?”

“How are you?”

“Fine. Is... is anything the matter? It’s... it’s not Bud, is it? Nothing’s happened to—”

“No, no, he’s fine.” He heard her catch her breath on the other end of the line.

“Well, how have you been, Andy? I understand you were on the road?”

“Yes. Helen...”

“Yes?”

“You sound like you were sleeping.”

“I was. My parents are away for a few weeks. In Rockaway. I’ve been getting to bed early.”

“Have you?” he asked, his voice thickening.

“Yes. I have.” There was another long silence. “Well,” she said, “it was nice of you to call, Andy.”

“Helen, listen, Helen, I was wondering... can I come over?”

“What?”

“I want to come over.”

“Why?”

“I... I need somebody to talk to. Helen, I... look, about that time...”

“Let’s not bring it up, Andy.”

“Can I come over?”

Helen hesitated. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not even dressed.”

“Helen, I... I need someone. To... to talk to. I need you.”

He waited anxiously, hating himself for what he was doing, but hating Carol at the same time, and hating the homecoming she’d given him, and the petty questions, and her lack of understanding, hating all of it, and waiting breathlessly for Helen’s reply. He heard her sigh heavily.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll look for you.”

21

change of key, iii

AUGUST, 1945

They dropped the first atomic bomb on August sixth.

Sixty per cent of Hiroshima was obliterated by the blast. Five major industrial plants disappeared completely, and only 2.8 square miles of the city’s total 6.9 square miles remained intact to leer at a puzzled, battered, awe-stricken Oriental population. On August eighth Russia declared war on Japan, and the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on an important shipping and industrial city called Nagasaki, a city which had only been part of an American song before the fiery blast. President Truman warned the Japanese people that the atomic bomb would lead to their utter obliteration unless they surrendered unconditionally — and the world read the headlines and leaned forward expectantly for news from the men in the East.

The Japanese government offered to surrender under an interpretation of the Potsdam surrender ultimatum on August tenth, and then the surrender offer worked its way through the official channels, and on August eleventh President Truman spoke for the Allies, explaining the terms under which the emperor would be allowed to remain on the throne.

The world waited.

On August twelfth, an erroneous news broadcast flashed into millions of American homes, announcing that Japan had accepted the surrender terms. The news Hash was killed two minutes after it went over the wire, but it touched off wild celebrations which reluctantly petered out during the next two days of expectant waiting.

Japan surrendered unconditionally on August fourteenth.

Helen went into the streets that night. Everyone was in the streets, it seemed, singing and shouting and reeling and rioting. There was wild jubilation in the air, an excitement that throbbed in her body. She was kissed a hundred times, a thousand times. There were strange hands briefly touching her, strange bottles being put to her lips, and beneath all the reckless release of tension there was a wild triumphant singing in her blood, an ecstasy born of the knowledge that it was all over.

The block parties began the next night, all over Brooklyn, banners hung, bands hired, beer kegs rolled into the streets, dancing, and singing, and cheering, and shouting, and all of it fun, all of it a complete sort of happiness she had never really known before, a release of fear, and a release of anxiety, a victorious, happy, surging feeling of delight.

She went from party to party, and she didn’t know how or why she ended up at this particular shindig, and she suspected she was not entirely sober when she got there, but that didn’t matter because all of Brooklyn was drunk that night — the whole city was drunk, the whole world was drunk.

She wasn’t sure she was seeing clearly at first, wasn’t sure because that looked like Bud and Tony, but Tony was somewhere in Florida, wasn’t he? And Bud...

She was dancing with someone when she saw the two boys, and she blinked her eyes over her partner’s shoulder — she couldn’t even remember his name now, someone unimportant, one of the long line of unremembered people she’d danced with and kissed with and drunk with in those few wild days of celebration — and then she said, “Oh, look!” and she broke away from the boy and started running over to where she thought she’d seen Bud and Tony standing.

She was running over to Bud, she knew, wanting the end of the war to symbolize the end of what was standing between them, but when she realized she was doing that, she faltered for a moment and then, carried on by her momentum, rushed over to both of them and swung Tony around and said, “Tony! For God’s sake!”

They both looked very handsome in their dress blues, Tony with a lyre and two red stripes on his sleeve, and Bud with two crossed flags and only one red stripe on his. Tony lifted her into his arms and shouted, “Helen! Honey, what are you doing here? I was beginning to think there wasn’t a friendly face left in Brooklyn!”

“You look won-derful!” she shouted, and she glanced sidewise at Bud, and he smiled and very softly said, “Hello, Helen.”

“Haven’t you got a kiss for the victors?” Tony asked, and Helen kissed him soundly and happily, and when he released her she looked questioningly at Bud, wanting to say, “Bud, what happened to us? Can’t we forget all this? Couldn’t we...”

But he stood there solemnly embarrassed, a pained smile on his face, as if her kissing Tony had somehow pierced the blue of his uniform and lodged in his breast like a sharp, narrow shaft.

“Have you been drinking?” Tony asked suspiciously.

“Damn right I’ve been drinking,” she said, feeling the liquor again now that Tony had reminded her of it.

“I’ve smuggled in a jug,” Tony said, “but don’t let any of these sloppy beer drinkers see it.”

He reached under his jumper and sneaked out a pint of cheap whisky, which he uncapped and passed to Helen.

“No glass,” he said. “I hope you’re not proud.”

“Not at all,” she said, and she tilted the bottle and drank from it freely. She passed the bottle back to Tony, and he handed it to Bud.

“Buddy?”

“Thanks,” Bud said. He drank from the bottle, and then Tony took a long draw from it. Someone on the flag-decorated bandstand was making a speech about “the brave boys who defended our homeland in her hour of need and who would now return to...” and someone standing over near the beer keg yelled, “Come on, let’s have some music!” The man on the bandstand terminated his speech abruptly, and a piano player, a sax man, and a drummer went back onto the bandstand and began playing “Beer Barrel Polka,” and everyone rushed into the street and began dancing. There were pennants and banners stretched across the street from building to building. “Welcome Home, Boys” and “V-J Day!” and “Victory,” and, for no apparent reason now, “Slap the Jap!” There were a lot of servicemen, and a lot of young undraftable kids in sports jackets, and some kids in tee shirts and dungarees, and old women in housedresses, smiling, and old men in under shirts, smiling, and pretty girls in summery dresses, the flush of excitement and alcohol on their faces, their bodies taut with spring-coil energy.

“Are you on leave, Tony?” Helen asked, and he replied, “Sent most of us off the minute they heard them whistles blasting in the bay. I caught a plane out from the army base.”

“What about you, Bud?” she asked.

“We kept just a skeleton crew on the ship. We’re still up in Boston, you know.”

“I’d heard you went overseas.”

“No. We were supposed to, but someone got the bright idea of changing our ship to a picket ship. We’ve been in drydock ever since our second shakedown.”

“Is that good or bad?” she asked.

“It’s a honeymoon. Boston’s a good town.”

“Do you come in often?”

“Once in a while,” he said, and she thought she detected a sudden wariness in his voice.

“Hey, how about dancing, Helen?” Tony asked, and without waiting for her reply he scooped her into his arms and went polka-ing off with her. She watched Bud over Tony’s shoulder. He was looking around now, sizing up the girls in their thin frocks. Tony collided with someone on the floor, and she was rammed up hard against him, and she felt the bulge of the whisky pint tucked into the waistband of his trousers. She pulled away, and they went into the polka again, Tony swinging his aim wildly as if he were flagging a train. The polka ended and the band went into a fox trot, and Tony pulled her close to him and she could smell the whisky on his breath, and she wondered idly if she smelled the same way. And then, curiously, she recalled the nights she’d spent with Andy. The first night he’d called her, and the thin desperation in his voice that night. And the talking they’d done, and then the other nights before he left with another band, the whisky they’d consumed on those nights, the things they’d done, and she wondered why she had, except that he seemed to need someone so badly, and all the while she watched Bud.

He was still looking around, taking his time in picking a partner, looking somehow restless in the midst of all the obvious joviality. He did not move from where he stood near the curb. He kept his arms folded across his chest, his fists clenched, his white hat cocked over one eye. He did not turn his head. Only his eyes moved, and they moved quickly, restlessly, and he seemed dissatisfied with what those eyes saw. He looked up at the bandstand, as if making some mental calculation, and then he gave a small nervous shrug and started out into the street which served as a dance floor.

She wondered where he was going for a moment, and then she realized he was coming toward her and Tony, and she realized at the same instant that she’d been hoping he would do just that. She wanted very much to talk to him, to be able at last to clear the air, to expose her heart and tell him about what had happened, exactly as it had happened, so that things would be just the way they were that time at Rockaway, before Andy, and before Bud had been taken away from her by the navy. She could feel the hammering of her heart beneath the clinging silk of her dress, and she was sure Tony could feel her heart drumming, too, and then she saw the embarrassed smile form on Bud’s face, and then his hand reached out, and he clapped Tony on the shoulder, and Tony looked up, absorbed and then surprised.

“How about sharing the wealth, mate?” Bud asked.

Tony backed away and bowed from the waist, and then swept his arm across his knees like a cavalier. He reached for the bottle under his jumper and moved off the dance floor to the sidewalk.

They did not speak to each other for several moments. She moved into his arms, and they kept a respectable distance between them because their bodies were strangers now. And, oddly, she did not want to be close to him. Not yet. There was a transparent film hanging between them, and they would have to tear through that first, rip it away, and, until then, until then, they would still be strangers to each other, going through the motions of polite society, making inane remarks about the weather. The big trouble was still between them, and it would not vanish until they sought it out and exposed it to the light, and then there would be time, then there would be all the time in the world.

“Real cornball, isn’t it?” Bud said.

“What?”

“The band.”

“Well,” she said, smiling, “nothing could ever compare to the Tony Banner Boys.”

“You can say that again,” he said.

They swung around the floor awkwardly, the habit of dancing together having grown rusty. “You’ve grown up, Helen,” he said.

“Have I?”

“Yes. You look damned good. When’s the last time I saw you?”

“I don’t know. Last spring, was it?” She knew the date exactly. She could reel off the date and the hour and the minute exactly if she wanted to. “Long ago.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“You’re prettier now.”

“Thank you.”

“You always were the prettiest girl around, anyway. For my money. Helen, you look damned good. Listen, do we... do we have to stay here?”

“What?”

“I’ve got my father’s car. Can we take a ride?”

She heard his voice, and she heard his suggestion, and the words came to her in a rushing roar, as if he were standing somewhere far off on a crag overlooking the sea, and the sound of his voice was mixed with the thunder of the rushing waves. And then she realized the thunder was only the roar of her blood, and she felt suddenly so elated that she wanted to scream aloud because he was asking her just what she’d wanted him to ask her, and she knew that now they would talk, at last they would talk it all out, get all the festering poison out of their systems, and be the way they were again.

“Yes,” she said. “I would like to take a ride.”

He seemed surprised. She watched his face, and she loved the surprise that spread over it, and she squeezed his hand, but only very slightly because things weren’t really all solved yet, and because the familiarity of squeezing his hand, even this small familiarity was strange to her, and because she felt that so much talking had to be done before they would really know each other again, before their eyes and their hands and their bodies could become familiar again.

They left the block party without telling Tony where they were going. She noticed that there was a quickness to his step, and she marveled at the way he walked, a real sailor’s roll having replaced his earlier loping gait. And the quickness of his step found a responding note in the steady drumming of her heart, and she told her heart, Be still, be still, this is only the beginning, we’ve so much to learn.

They rounded the corner, and she saw his father’s old Chewy, and she thought again of how long it had been, how long since she’d been inside this car, since she’d known the intimacy of its upholstery, the intricacy of the window mechanism on the right-hand door — hit the door first and then turn the handle very very slowly — how long since she had used the glove compartment as a personal storage locker for her lipstick and her tissues and her purse. And seeing the car, she felt that she was finally coming home, and she realized how silly she was being because the car was really just a beat-up old rattletrap, but it belonged to her now, and she wanted to be sitting in it again, alongside Bud, and they would talk, and they would clear this all up, and she would explain what had happened and how...

“Recognize it?” he asked.

“Yes. Oh, yes,” she said.

The car was parked beneath an old tree heavy with leaves. Very little light filtered down through the thick foliage. There was only a mottled lacelike tracing of pale silver on the roof of the car. He opened the door for her, and she climbed in, feeling comfortable at once in the car, leaning over from habit to open the door for him on the other side. He hesitated outside the car for a moment, taking off his hat and flipping it onto the back seat. There was something strangely impatient about the gesture, and a momentary frown puckered her brow, and then he bent, and the frown vanished, and he was inside the car beside her, and she heard the door slam, shutting out the night.

He reached for her instantly.

His fingers caught at her shoulders, and then he pulled her toward him, and she felt herself shaking her head, and then his mouth came down on hers, and the kiss was cruel, a grinding kiss that hurt her mouth. Her lips were not ready for his kiss. Her mind and her body were not ready for this yet.

She pulled back from him, shocked, her eyes wide.

“Bud—” she started, wanting to talk. Couldn’t he see that there was so much to say, so much time to span with words before...

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Do you want to take off your lipstick?”

The words were familiar to her, very familiar, and their familiarity was as jarring as his kiss had been. She couldn’t answer him for a moment. She sat staring at him, speechless when there was so much to say, her hands folded in her lap, her body stiff.

“Come on,” he said.

“No, I—” She shook her head — “no.”

“What’s the matter?”

She was suddenly cold all over. She began shivering, and she hoped her teeth would not rattle. He moved toward her again.

“Helen?”

“What?” she asked dully.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes. Yes, Buddy, you know that. Buddy, can’t we...?”

His arms were around her again. She saw his face above her, and then the face blurred, and she turned away, avoiding his kiss, and he drew back, surprised again.

“You want to go somewhere else?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“Bud, this isn’t... isn’t what I want.” The words would not move out of her throat. She swallowed. “I wanted us to... to...” How could she explain to him? Couldn’t he see, didn’t he know? Didn’t he know that this was all wrong, that this would solve nothing?

“Helen,” he said, “my ship won’t be in dry dock long. After that, God knows where the navy’ll send us. Just because the war is over doesn’t mean they’re going to let us all out tomorrow, you know. Hell, it might be another year yet. So...”

She turned her face away from him and then began shaking her head, and he changed his tack instantly, and she recognized the falseness of his new approach, and her ears were dead to it even before it gained full momentum.

“I’ve thought about you a lot, Helen.”

“Really?” she said, the pain in her heart and in her mind, almost unable to bear his words because she knew they were false and she wanted them so desperately to be true.

“All the time. Aboard ship, in strange towns. I’ve always thought about you, and... and what we had together, and what a jackass I was. Helen, I was just a kid then. I know better now. I know the things that matter now.”

For a moment she believed him. She looked up, and her eyes were bright with the effort of believing, and her experience with Andy rushed up into her throat, burned there, begged to be told, and she said, “Really, Bud?”

“Sure, honey,” he said smoothly, pressing his advantage. “Come on, Helen. Come on.” He slid over on the seat, and he pulled her toward him roughly.

Her eyes lost their luster. “Bud,” she said slowly, “sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever grow up.”

“What?”

“Bud, will you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Go back to your ship, whenever you have to go back, and forget about meeting me here tonight, will you? Will you do me that one little favor? Pretend—”

“I don’t want to pre—”

“Pretend it was all over just when we thought it was all over, last spring outside Club Beguine. Do you remember that night, Bud? Bud, forget we ever knew each other, forget our paths ever crossed, can you do that for me? Just forget you ever knew anyone named Hel—”

“I don’t ever want to forget you.”

“Bud, Bud—”

“Why do you want me to do that?”

“Just do it, please.”

“Are you drunk, Helen?”

“No, I’m not drunk.”

“Then why don’t we take a little ride and—”

“I don’t want a little ride, Bud. That’s not what I want.”

“Then what do you want? Name it, Helen, and I’ll get it for you.”

“Oh, Bud, please,” she said impatiently.

“What have I done wrong?” he asked plaintively, as if he couldn’t understand why his careful approach had failed.

“Go back to your ship, Bud.”

“All right, I will. But what about the meantime?”

“There is no meantime.”

“Why not?”

“Bud, for God’s sake, stop it! Stop it before I start bawling all over your pretty blue jumper. Please!”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing! Goddammit, you’re the stupidest male I’ve ever met.”

“What did I—”

“Bud, Bud, Bud, please shut up, please. Please.”

“I thought this was going to be a happy reunion,” he said. “So many months since we’ve seen each other, and instead—”

“You thought—”

“Instead you treat me like dirt. Well, I guess I know when I’m not welcome.”

“I guess you do,” she said tiredly.

“I’m not saying I understand you, Helen. Mind you, I’m not saying that. I thought—”

“I know what you thought.”

“Well—”

“You thought all you had to do was crook your little finger. And then all the hurt, and all the misunderstanding, and everything, everything would just disappear. We’d kiss and make up, just like the song says. Well, Bud, the song is wrong. You can’t do it that way. It’s no good that way. Bud, can’t you see that we have to—”

“Helen, you just don’t understand me,” he said.

“I understand you fine, Bud.” She paused for a long time. “Do what I asked you to, will you? Forget all about it.”

“I don’t want to forget all about it.”

“Then write to me. When you get back to your ship, write to me. I’ll be waiting for you to grow up. I want to be around when you grow up.”

“I’ll be nineteen next month,” he said defensively.

“A man,” she said.

“Look—”

“Write to me.”

“Sure,” he said dully. “A lot the hell good writing to you is gonna do.”

“It might do a lot of good,” she answered. “Come on, Tony is getting lonely.”

She stepped out of the car, not waiting for him, not looking back. She heard his door slam viciously. She stopped then, not knowing why she was stopping. He came up to her, and she stood before him, looking up at him. She reached up and touched his cheek gently, and her eyes were sadly puzzled, and she said, “It’s such a shame, Bud,” and he didn’t know what she meant.

Tony was half crocked when they reached him. He handed the near-empty pint to Bud, and Bud tilted it to his mouth savagely, drinking until Helen took the bottle away from him. She put it to her own mouth and almost drained it in a single swallow.

“This is a good night to get drunk,” she said. “Let’s have some beer, too. What do you navy boys call it, Tony? A boilermaker, isn’t it?”

“Boilermakersh!” Tony bellowed.

He staggered over to the beer keg with Helen, and they drew two glasses and then poured the remainder of the whisky into the beer. Bud watched them for a while and then asked the piano player if he could sit in, and the piano man — anxious to dance with a brunette who’d been ogling him all night — hastily relinquished the stool.

Helen and Tony came to the bandstand in the middle of the set.

Bud looked down from the piano, and Tony said, “We leavin’, mate.”

Bud’s face did not change. His eyes shifted from Tony’s to Helen’s, but his face did not change. She watched him carefully, wanting him to say something, wanting him to say the words that would make everything all right, wanting him to tell her he understood now.

“Good night,” he said.

“I’m takin’ Helen home,” Tony said. “You wanna come along?”

“No,” Bud said. “I’ll stick around here.”

“Bud?” Helen said.

“Yeah?”

“C’mon, Helen,” Tony said. “Le’sh go.”

“Bud, write to me.”

“Sure,” he answered, and then he turned back to the keyboard.