Читать книгу The Ninth Wave - Eugene Burdick - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Highway 99 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield cuts directly across the Tehachapi Mountains in a twisting narrow road which was known as the Ridge Route. At the bottom of almost every elevation there was the huge burned-out hulk of a truck which wore out its brake-shoes on the descent and had to crash off the road. On the Bakersfield side of the Ridge Route, beyond the Grapevine, is a smooth long strip of asphalt which drops gently toward Bakersfield for twenty miles without a turn in the road. Here is where the great semi-trailers are in the most danger, for the slope is so gradual that unless the driver drops down into a lower gear every few miles he is soon going so fast that his brakes are crisped black at the first touch and the truck runs away. On the long slope the runaway trucks reach eighty or ninety or even one hundred miles an hour before the driver will run the truck off the road. The straight rows of eucalyptus trees that line the road are scarred and battered by the accidents and occasionally an entire tree will be destroyed or stunted.

In the summer the wrecks are marked by enormous clots of alfalfa that look as if they had been exploded over the landscape. In the spring the wrecks will scatter carrots down the road and occasionally an egg truck will crash and gobbets of egg yolk are splattered over the fields, the roadside cafés, the black asphalt and passing cars. When one of the milk trucks crashes there is a sudden eruption of milk running down the side of the road and then, with incredible speed, the flies arrive in great dense clouds.

Hank Moore and Mike came down the Grapevine in Hank’s Model-A on their way to Stanford. Hank kept his long thin fingers on the gearshift and when it wobbled too much he double-clutched and slid it into second gear. Then the Ford would tremble, the rear wheels would shriek against the asphalt and the car would slow down to forty-five miles an hour.

“How much money have you got, Hank,” Mike asked.

“About five hundred bucks,” Hank said.

Mike whistled.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“I had it. Had it around for a long time.”

“I’m damned. Old Hankus with all that money and no one knew it. You’re a funny one. Live by yourself in a boardinghouse, don’t have a family, only work a little bit and you’ve got five hundred bucks. I work every Saturday and all summer and all I’ve got is two hundred bucks. And fifty of that my mother gave me. I don’t know where she got it. Come on, Hank. Where did you get that money?”

Hank looked over at Mike and grinned.

“Maybe I’ll tell you later. But I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I earned it.”

“How long will my two hundred bucks last at Stanford?”

“Not very long. Tuition is $115, room and board at Encina is $120 a quarter. Books will cost a little. You haven’t got enough to last even a quarter.”

“I’ll make it do. I’ve got ways. I understand you can sign a note for the tuition and pay it off when you graduate. So I’ll have enough for the first quarter.”

The eucalyptus trees whirred by, big shreds of bark hanging from their boles, putting a pungent oil smell out into the air. They passed a truck going very slowly and as they went by they saw huge round bottles labeled Acid nestled in excelsior on the bed of the truck.

“Look, Mike. I don’t want a lot of talk and crap about money when we get up there,” Hank said and his voice was sharp. “I’m going to have enough other things to worry about. We’ll pool our money and I’ll let you know when we start to run out. When that happens we’ll talk about money. Not before. O.K.?”

“That wouldn’t be fair. You’re the guy with most ...” Mike started to say.

“Don’t give me that crap, I said,” Hank cut in. “Just say yes or no. If I put in more money than you I’ll get a good return on it. One way or another.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mike asked.

“For one thing I’m depending on you to pull me through some of the courses. The ones in English and history and that sort of thing. I don’t do very well in those.” Hank hesitated and then went on. “I didn’t tell you, but I’m going to take a pre-med course. There will be lots of chemistry and biology and that sort of thing. I want to concentrate on those. You pull me through the other courses and we’ll forget about the money. Just say yes or no.”

“Yes.”

From behind them they heard the shrill, peculiarly heavy whine of truck tires going too fast. Hank looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled far over to the right. The truck flashed by them; too fast to see anything except a white blob of a face, a long stack of red bricks and the blur of wheels. As it passed they heard a harsh long-continued grind, the raw smash of metal against metal, and then a snap as the transmission refused to slip into a lower gear.

“He must be doing eighty,” Hank said quietly.

“His brakes were gone,” Mike said. “You could smell them as he went by.”

The truck quickly grew smaller, seemed to fade away. The red bricks shimmered for a moment and then the truck disappeared around a slower-moving truck. Faintly, but still with the savage tear of metal gnashing, they heard the truck try to go into gear. Each time it snapped out. Then even the sound was gone.

“Mike, what do they do when you get to Stanford?” Hank asked. “I mean do they have someone to meet you, to show you around?”

Mike looked over, startled.

“Hankus, no one is going to say hello, goodbye, or yes, no, kiss my ass,” Mike said. “They’ll take your money, stamp your cards and that will be it. What did you expect?”

“I didn’t know what to expect. That’s why I asked. O.K. Now I know.”

“You know, but it doesn’t make you feel very good,” Mike said. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the seat. “Well, it makes me feel good. I don’t want anyone to shake my hand and show me around and then feel that he has done me a favor. I want to arrive and look around and know that every person I look at doesn’t give the slightest damn about me. No obligations, no debts. Then you can do what you want.”

“What do you want to do?” Hank asked quietly.

“I’m not sure. But when I decide I want to be able to do it. I want to be able to look at every person and figure they are enemies and then decide what I want to do. I don’t want to be tied up with some of them.” Mike hesitated, reached for adequate words. “It sounds a little crazy, Hank. I know. But I’ve got a theory.”

“What’s your theory?”

“I don’t have it all worked out yet. Just part of it. But I’ll work out the rest of it. But right now I know I don’t want to feel obligated. I don’t want a lot of this phony friendship crap. Later when I know more I’ll tell you the whole theory.”

Hank looked over at Mike. Mike was looking straight ahead and he had an odd half-smile; the lips drawn back as if to smile, no real humor on his face. Really, Hank thought, it’s like the beginning of a snarl, but when Mike does it, it looks attractive. He knew that Mike would never tell him the rest of the theory.

Ten miles later they passed the semi with the bricks. When it hit a tree at the side of the road the bricks had kept moving and sliced off the top of the cab. There was an ambulance there and someone was picking wet fragments off the stacks of bricks. A bored cop was motioning cars past. A man and woman had stopped their car and were quickly loading some of the loose bricks into the back seat. A cop ran toward them and waved them away. Hank drove quickly past and a few miles later he took the turnoff for Coalinga and Blackwell’s Corners.

They drove for a half hour past old oil well derricks. The derricks were oil soaked and great clots of dust stuck to them. Beneath most of the derricks was a neat shiny engine which drove a pumping arm slowly up and down. The various pumps were connected by a pattern of pipes which led to large shiny tanks. There were no men in the oil fields for these were old wells and needed little care. They slowed down for Taft and then shot down the road toward Coalinga.

“Hank, where did you come from before you came to L.A.?” Mike asked.

Hank looked at Mike and saw that he was smiling, but he saw it was a different smile now.

“North Dakota.”

“Really? I thought you were from New York or Chicago.”

“That’s because I’m Jewish. Everybody in California thinks that Jews come from Brooklyn or Chicago.”

“Was your name Hank Moore in North Dakota?” Mike asked. “That isn’t a very Jewish name.”

“It isn’t Jewish at all. My name has always been Hank Moore though. I had a father who thought if you called things by different names you might eventually change them.”

“And he wanted to change things?”

“Sure. He wanted to stop being a Jew and be something else. I couldn’t blame the poor bastard. When he was a kid his father took him out on the road to sell hardware, cheap jewelry, perfume, everything. Dad was no good at it and somehow he got into the hotel business and drifted from town to town. Finally he wound up owning a railroad hotel in this town in North Dakota. Ever seen a railroad hotel? Well, this one was a beauty ...”

It had twenty-eight rooms and was just fifty feet from the railroad tracks and a set of switching spurs. It was a square ugly old building that had been painted once, but now had only a few shreds of paint up around the eaves and in spots where the sun never hit. In the winter the wind came solid and cold off the prairie and the half-inch boards of the hotel seemed barely able to keep it out, really to only break the flat blast of it. In the summer it absorbed all the heat in the sky; filled itself with moist-packed hotness during the day and held it tightly throughout the night. When trains went by the hotel chattered, light bulbs flickered and water spilled out of glasses that were too full. There were no fans in the hotel and each six rooms shared a toilet and bath. The washbowls had deep yellow scars in them where dripping water had built up a slow growing stain.

Occasionally a commercial man would come there by mistake, but he would never stay longer than one night.

Hank’s father sat behind the desk in the lobby. A naked electric bulb shone down on his balding head and threw his watering eyes into the shadow. He had long sloping shoulders and big muscles, but his body had the wrinkled baggy look of an athlete who has suddenly stopped exercising. His skin drooped off his arms in sheets and was dry and scaly. The skin on his face was a collection of sags and folds that pressed down on one another. He never spoke to anyone. Occasionally he would reach an arm out and stop a brakeman or engineer who hadn’t paid for a few weeks and hold his palm up. The men would laugh and give him whatever change they had and he would enter the sum in a large notebook which he kept in a childish scrawling hand.

Once a month his father caught a ride in a caboose to Bismarck, and was back in two days. After each trip he would take a slip of white paper carefully from his pocket and drive it on the nail of a spindle that he kept in the back of the unlocked safe. Hank had looked once at the pieces of paper. The old ones on the bottom were browned with age, while the ones on the top were crisper and newer looking. At the top of each slip of paper was the letterhead, “Dr. J. J. Locke. Specialist in Men’s Diseases. All Consultation Private, No Painful Operations Necessary.” And then the line, “Laboratory Report.” Under this would be a line in handwriting. “Wassermann test, plus.” Occasionally the slips of paper would bear a prescription for pills and his father would take the pills for a few days and then forget them. A drawer under his desk was full of little blue boxes which had forgotten pills in them.

Hank could not remember his mother. She had disappeared somewhere long ago.

Hank had worked in the hotel when he was a boy. He had peeled potatoes in the kitchen, pounded the thick red strips of tough meat with flour, opened cans of pale string beans and helped serve the food in thick porcelain bowls. He had cut hundreds of pies into dry crusty triangles, each with a lip of thin sugary goo on its edges and served them to the men in the dining room. Sometimes when they could not get a chambermaid he made the beds and swept the corridors. The floors were old soft wood and they smelled of Lysol. The bedrooms smelled of tobacco and coal and dried grease. He liked working in the kitchen best because he could talk to the endless stream of Chinese cooks that worked there. They came in, silent, yellow and smooth skinned, cooked for several months and then moved on. One had been a college boy from Columbia on his way back to China. He had talked patiently to Hank about Confucianism, explaining over and over in his singsong voice that it all hinged on the love and respect for one’s parents. Hank had laughed at him and finally the cook had left one night after slapping Hank with the flat edge of a knife.

When Hank was eight he had asked his father about going to school. His father had turned his heavy, shiny head down from the height of the stool and looked over the counter at Hank. He had scratched his head and a few white scales fell from his fingernails. Finally he had turned his hands up in a noncommittal gesture and shrugged his shoulders. So Hank had forgotten about school until he was thirteen.

When he was not working in the hotel Hank hung around various buildings and offices in the town. The best place was the rear of the taxicab office where the tobacco-stained politics of the town were decided. In front of the taxi office there was a neon light that blinked steadily, day and night, summer and winter, “Taxi. Five ride for the price of one.” In the rear of the office there were a half dozen chairs with smooth leather cushions on them. The chairs were occupied by three scrawny-necked merchants, who were brothers, and the fat-jowled chief of police. The chief was related to one of the merchants. In the ’28 campaign they had put a picture of Al Smith underneath the spittoon and all you could see was the fringe of Al’s head. Across the white part of the sign someone printed “A Dirty Cat-licker.” The spit splashed brown stains over the picture and by election time it had vanished beneath a hardened scum of old tobacco-specked saliva. When the election was over Hank had removed the poster and looked at the circle that had lain under the spittoon. There was a bright circle of a man’s face with a bright politician’s smile on it and the then hardened brown juice, framing it all. He cut it out with a razor and took it back to the hotel.

In the taxi office they had a file case full of little half-pint bottles of corn whisky and when an election got close, which was seldom, they would send the three taxicab drivers out into town. The drivers would scour the town, making their tiny bribes with the bottles. They would sweep the pool hall, the hotel, the several Negro families along side the railroad track, the farm boys in town for election, the whores, everyone before them into the polls. They would come just before the polls closed, a waving, yelling froth of men and women. They would flow into the polls and vote. The drivers would herd them in gently, joking with them and making sure that they knew where to put the X. No one ever cheated when they got behind the black curtain; none of them got that drunk, not on a half pint of whisky.

The town regularly spent $43,500 a year and the three turkey-necked merchants and the chief controlled every cent of it. They noted it down on the back of envelopes and shifted the figures around and laughed a good deal. Once they gave the chief $1200 to go to an F.B.I. course in Washington, but he had a few drinks on the train and went to New York and stayed in a big hotel with a famous movie actress for a week. “Forty dollars for black lace panties and eighty-five for good bonded bourbon,” he had told the merchants when he returned and they had filled the back of the office with laughter. He never did tell anyone the actress’s name.

Hank learned about business and high finance from a Jewish tailor. His name was Cohen and he had a little shop on the main street. He had lost his wife and four children in a pogrom in Poland. The mob had closed in dense and black on the ghetto, moving down the streets with a soft tinkling of broken glass and a great roaring sound. Cohen had hurried his family ahead of him as long as he could and then the youngest boy had said he had a stitch in his side and wanted to stop. In a second of panic Cohen had left his wife and four children huddled together against a wall as he ran ahead to search for a hiding place. He heard the strange lowing, eager sound of the mob and then as he ran back toward his family he saw the mob reach them. There was a nameless, odd, sharp snapping noise as the mob absorbed his family and he knew instinctively that they were all dead. He ran toward the mob, a thin scarecrow of a man, hoping to be killed, to be kicked to death, to suffer for a few seconds and then be gone with his family. He muttered curses through his stringy beard as he ran shouting in a high messianic voice for revenge and threw his skinny arms wildly in the air.

The mob hesitated as they saw him. The low ominous howl diminished and they stared at him with bewilderment. By the time he reached them they were no longer a mob, only stolid businessmen, housewives, laborers, electricians, fishmongers. He threw himself on these individuals, hoping to be picked up and beaten and killed. But they pushed him away, the bright excitement fading from their eyes and replaced by a look of boredom. The crowd split up, began to walk away and there was no way that he could arouse them. He was never able to find the bodies of his family, for as if the mob had been a huge animal they had been absorbed, digested, and vanished away.

Since the pogrom Cohen had always felt threatened by crowds. When his tailor shop had three or four customers simultaneously his eyes began to bulge slightly and he breathed quickly. Hank was in his shop one day when the Rotary Club came out of the hotel after their luncheon, their feet scraping on the pavement, their voices laughing, the sound of a crowd of people in motion. Cohen’s head snapped up, his needle gleamed in the air, he seemed to stop breathing for a long second. Hank listened with the Jew’s ears and a shiver of fear ran down his back as the businessmen laughed, shuffled their feet, lifted their voices in raucous jokes.

“It’s the Rotary Club,” Hank said, leaning toward Cohen. “They’ve just finished their Tuesday lunch.”

“Ya, ya, of course,” Cohen breathed, “only the Rotary Club.” His lips curved into a smile although his eyes were brilliant with fear. He did not relax until the last sound had left the street.

Hank was in Cohen’s shop on a Fourth of July. Across town a band was playing, firecrackers popped and a parade was beginning. The sounds drifted lazily through the hot summer air, people put chairs on their lawns to watch the parade pass, the pulse of the town was slow. Cohen sat with the cloth close to his face, stitching rapidly and talking into the cloth.

The parade rounded a corner far away and suddenly, by some odd refraction of sound, in the tailor shop Hank and Cohen could hear the shuffling of the parade, slow, steady, cadenced. The music stopped for a moment and down the hot dead air of the town, caught between the unpainted buildings, came the sound of marching feet. The sound of feet was not obscured by the music, but was a raw, solid sound with a vitality of its own. Cohen looked over the piece of cloth, his eyes glittered with terror. He put the cloth down and stood up.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said and started for the rear door.

“I’ll go with you,” Hank said, but the tailor did not even hear him. He walked quickly, staring straight ahead. He stumbled once over a sleeping dog and swung his head vaguely toward it when it barked in pain. Hank walked beside him. They were at the edge of town and still the sound of the parade had not diminished, but seemed to throb and swell as if the parade were growing in size. At some point Hank stopped thinking of it as a parade and thought of it as a mob also.

They both walked faster and faster and when they got to the edge of town they cut across a field of rye. They were almost running as they crossed it and when he looked back Hank could see the erratic, zigzag path they had left, as if two small and insane animals had passed through. They splashed through a small creek and were oblivious of the mud that caked on their shoes. At some point the sound of the parade died away and they began to walk at a normal pace. Late that night they re-entered the town and Hank went quietly to the railroad hotel.

Ever since that night Hank had known that he was a Jew. The crazy, stumbling flight through the town and across the fields was a kind of ritual; an initiation; the assumption of a burden; a primitive act of faith. Hank was thirteen years old at the time.

Hank learned about love and the family from the girls at the hotel. Some of them were plain dumpy girls who worked in restaurants or in stores and others were simply whores, who wore flashy clothes very tight across the hips. And the professionals wore furs that Hank could not forget. They were skimpy fox pelts with the heads still attached. The jaws were strengthened by a spring and each of the mouths bit into the tail of another and they went over a woman’s shoulder in an endless circle of biting foxes. Even before he knew what the girls did in the upstairs rooms of the hotel Hank hated them for the furs with the little glass eyes, tiny varnished claws and red biting mouths.

The girls drifted into the hotel around nightfall. Some of them went steady with one man; others simply sat in the lobby and waited for an invitation.

Because of the thinness of the walls, the open doors and the loud voices, what went on in the rooms between men and women could not be avoided. The sounds of it echoed in the corridors and the men talked about it in the dining room so that to Hank it was like the Lysol smell of the floors or the loose scabs of ancient paint on the outside of the hotel. It was part of the hotel; part of its dark smelly substance.

When he was eleven Hank had seen Old Kelly, the oldest engineer on the line, beat up one of the girls. She had run out into the hall and Old Kelly had caught her at the foot of the stairs. They had stood there, both of them naked, Old Kelly hitting her the way men hit one another, straight solid blows on the lumpy body of the woman. It made a sound like someone kneading bread; not a slapping sound, but a dull, soggy, damaging sound. The woman had scratched out at Old Kelly, but finally had fallen forward into his arms, so that he could no longer hit her. Hank had watched them make their stumbling broken way back to the room.

Once two of the girls, a little older than the rest, had stopped him in the lobby. They were both very drunk and ready to cry. One had patted him on the head and said, “A little boy I might have had.” Hank had knocked her hand away and backed off, angry. The two girls had cried, looking hopelessly at one another and at Hank. Big tears soaked their way through the powder and rouge and dropped pinkly and aimlessly from their chins. Their grief had been so great that they had staggered out into the night, without waiting for their railroaders to arrive.

By the time he was thirteen Hank was too big and gawky to sit in the corners. They ran him out of the taxicab office and the pool hall and Cohen asked him one day why he didn’t get a job. The girls in the hotel began to get angry with him for looking at them. Hank decided to go to school.

Hank enrolled in the local high school. He was the best student they had ever had. He finished the first two years of work in a single year. But at the start of his senior year he discovered mathematics and poker and quit school.

As soon as he learned mathematics in school he began to calculate the odds in the poker game that went on day after day down at the hotel. He took a statistics textbook from the library and with the deck of cards out in front of him he figured various combinations. He memorized columns and columns of figures and odds and chances until gradually he forgot the columns and knew by merely looking at a hand how it could be improved, how it compared with other hands and how a kicker would help it. Then he went down to the lobby where the men played poker and watched them. He moved from one man to another, watching their hands, checking their chances with his statistics. He noticed how some men place a chip over an ace when it comes to them down; that few men look again at their down card in stud if it is a face card; that most men swallow when they make a good draw; that the time to win in a poker game is late in the evenings when players are anxious to win back losings. The statistics he had learned rapidly, but the way men play took longer. At the end of a year he thought he knew enough to play.

One night he asked the men if he could play and they laughed and let him in. He bought five dollars worth of chips, a little stack of white and red, that when held between his fingers ran only up to his second knuckle. He lost rapidly until he had only three white chips and one red chip left in his fingers. Then he got over the confusion caused by the smoke over the table, the eyes, the rapid flicking of the cards and he started to win. He played cautiously, like a very stingy old man, and by midnight he had won six dollars. He was sixteen years old.

After that he played three nights a week. He carefully calculated his winnings from each man so that he never won enough from any one to anger him. His winnings were steady and constant, never varying more than fifty cents from the sum he predicted for the night. In a few months he had five hundred dollars in a cigar box in his room. The cigar box bulged with old tattered one-dollar bills, slick new fives, an occasional ten and a pile of silver coins.

One day he heard a fireman state that the landlord’s son was too good at poker not to be a cheater. Several of the other men nodded agreement. That night he got into the game on the first hand.

Carefully and very slowly he began to boost the bets. He made all of the men commit themselves equally and by midnight a few of them were beginning to sweat and the smoke around the shaded light was thick and yellow. By three o’clock the pots were averaging over fifty dollars each. The eyes around the table had turned red and the floor was littered with sandwich crusts and empty whisky bottles. Hank had won four hundred dollars by then. He went relentlessly after the rest and by dawn he had all the money on the board and a note from one of the railroaders that he owed Hank $66. Finally he played them for their change, for the nickels and dimes in their pockets. He played one engineer for his Waltham and stuck it in his pocket when he won. Some of the losers began to complain, but Hank ignored them and went on playing. Toward the end he made such large bets that even men with good hands could not afford to back up their cards.

When he had all of the visible money on the table he said he was going to the toilet and left the room. He went to his room, packed a wicker suitcase full of clothes and climbed out a window. He walked to the railroad yard and swung up into an empty boxcar. The next day he was in Bismarck ...

“Why did you come to Manual Arts High after all that?” Mike asked when Hank was finished. “You could be a professional gambler.”

“Too boring,” Hank said. “Gambling is the hardest way in the world to earn a living. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you either a man bored stiff or a knucklehead ... or both.”

“Do you ever hear from your father?”

“No. Not a word.”

“Why don’t you write him? I heard Jews were supposed to be great family people ... always taking care of one another and watching out for other members of the family.”

“Sure, Mike. You hear a lot of things that aren’t so,” Hank said and grinned. “That’s one of them. I’ll tell you some more later.”

A mile ahead of them a Portuguese sheepherder was trying to move a thousand sheep across the road. Like a formless tide the sheep ebbed onto the highway and then stood there motionless as the sheep dogs circled and barked. Hank slowed the car and came to a stop a few feet from the closest sheep.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mike said. “That guy probably had all week to get those sheep across the road and he has to pick the time when we are passing. What’s wrong with that crazy guy?” He glared out at the sheepherder, his face working with anger. Suddenly he turned to Hank and his face wore the wolfish raw grin that Hank hated. “It’s like everything else, Hank. You have to get out and fight for what’s yours. I’ll get us through this god damn herd of sheep. Just follow close.”

“Get back in the car, Mike,” Hank yelled. “It will only take a few minutes for them to cross the road.”

Mike grinned back over his shoulder. He walked toward the sheep and began kicking them. The sheep squealed in surprise, pushed sideways and away from the car. Mike walked steadily forward, kicking, pushing, cursing. The Portuguese sheepherder swore and shouted, the dogs barked and ran in frantic circles. Slowly the Model-A with Mike leading the way pushed through the dusty panicked herd of sheep. Finally they were through the sheep and the road was open.

Mike got back into the car. His face was streaked with sweat and dust.

“That’s the way to handle ’em, Hank,” Mike said breathlessly. “Men, women, sheep, horses and dogs all need to be pushed a little.”

“And even if you’re not in a hurry you have to get out and kick them?” Hank asked. “Just to be kicking?”

“That’s right, even if you’re not in a hurry,” Mike said. He looked slyly sideways at Hank. “But, of course, I’m in a hurry.”

“I know, I know,” Hank said.

The car sped down the road and began the long climb into the brown soft hills of the Coast Range.