Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

He started snuffling, unable to catch his breath. He tried to speak, but the words were only mangled sounds, huffed out with too much air and pain.

Then he forced himself to sit up and rubbed the back of his hand across his runny nose.

He stared at me. It was panic and fear and confusion and shame at being seen this way. “Th-they hit me from in back,” he said, snuffling,

“I know. I saw.”

“D’jou scare’m off?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t necessary. The backs of my thighs hurt from squatting. I sat down.

“My name is Gus,” he said, trying to be polite.

I didn’t know what name to give him. I was going to tell him the first name to come into my head, but heard myself say, “My name is Mr. Rosenthal.”

He looked startled. “That’s my name, too. Gus Rosenthal!”

“Isn’t that peculiar,” I said. We grinned at each other, and he wiped his nose again.

I didn’t want to see my mother or father. I had those memories. They were sufficient. It was little Gus I wanted to be with. But one night I crossed Into the backyard at 89 Harmon Drive from the empty lots that would later be a housing development.

And I stood in the dark, watching them eat dinner.

There was my father. I hadn’t remembered him being so handsome. My mother was saying something to him, and he nodded as he ate. They were in the dinette. Gus was playing with his food. Don’t mush your food around like that, Gus. Eat, or you can’t stay up to hear Lux Presents Hollywood.

But they’re doing “Dawn Patrol.”

Then don’t mush your food.

“Momma,” I murmured, standing in the cold, “Momma, there are children starving in Russia.” And I added, thirty-five years late, “Name two, Momma.”

I met Gus downtown at the newsstand.

“Hi.”

“Oh. Hullo.”

“Buying some comics?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever read Doll Man and Kid Eternity?”

“Yeah, they’re great. But I got them.”

“Not the new issues.”

“Sure do.”

“Bet you’ve got last months. He’s just checking in the new comics right now.”

So we waited while the newsstand owner used the heavy wire snips on the bundles, and checked off the magazines against the distributor’s long white mimeographed sheet. And I bought Gus Air boy and Jingle Jangle Comics and Blue Beetle and Whiz Comics and Doll Man and Kid Eternity.

Then I took him to Isaly’s for a hot fudge sundae. They served it in a tall tulip glass with the hot fudge in a little pitcher. When the waitress had gone to get the sundaes, little Gus looked at me. “Hey, how’d you know I only liked crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”

I leaned back in the high-walled booth and smiled at him.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gus?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Somebody put a nickel in the Wurlitzer in his booth, and Glenn Miller swung into “String of Pearls.”

“Well, did you ever think about it?”

“No, huh-uh. I like cartooning, maybe I could draw comic books.”

“That’s pretty smart thinking, Gus. There’s a lot of money to be made in art.” I stared around the dairy store, at the Coca-Cola posters of pretty girls with pageboy hairdos, drawn by an artist named Harold W. McCauley whose style would be known throughout the world, whose name would never be known.

He stared at me. “It’s fun, too, isn’t it?”

I was embarrassed. I’d thought first of money, he’d thought first of happiness. I’d reached him before he’d chosen his path. There was still time to make him a man who would think first of joy, all through his life.

“Mr. Rosenthal?”

I looked down and across, just as the waitress brought the sundaes. She set them down and I paid her. When she’d gone, Gus asked me, “Why did they call me a dirty Jewish elephant?”

“Who called you that, Gus?”

“The guys.”

“The ones you were fighting that day?”

He nodded. “Why’d they say elephant?”

I spooned up some vanilla ice cream, thinking. My back ached, and the rash had spread up my right wrist onto my forearm. “Well, Jewish people are supposed to have big noses, Gus.” I poured the hot fudge out of the little pitcher. It bulged with surface tension for a second, then spilled through its own dark-brown film, covering the three scoops of ice cream. “I mean, that’s what some people believe . So I suppose they thought it was smart to call you an elephant, because an elephant has a big nose...a trunk. Do you understand?”

“That’s dumb. I don’t have a big nose ... do I?”

“I wouldn’t say so, Gus. They most likely said it just to make you mad. Sometimes people do that.”

“That’s dumb.”

We sat there for a while and talked. I went far down inside the tulip glass with the long-handled spoon, and finished the deep dark, almost black bittersweet hot fudge. They hadn’t made hot fudge like that in many years. Gus got ice cream up the spoon handle, on his fingers, on his chin, and on his T-shirt. We talked about a great many things.

We talked about how difficult arithmetic was. (How I would still have to use my fingers sometimes even as an adult.) How the guys never gave a short kid his “raps” when the sandlot ball games were in progress. (How I overcompensated with women from doubts about stature.) How different kinds of food were pretty bad-tasting. (How I still used ketchup on well-done steak.) How it was pretty lonely in the neighborhood with nobody for friends. (How I had erected a facade of charisma and glamor so no one could reach me deeply enough to hurt me.) How Leon always invited all the kids over to his house, but when Gus got there, they slammed the door and stood behind the screen laughing and jeering. (How even now a slammed door raised the hair on my neck and a phone receiver slammed down, cutting me off, sent me into a senseless rage.) How comic books were great. (How my scripts sold so easily because I had never learned how to rein in my imagination.)

We talked about a great many things.

“I’d better get you home now,” I said.

“Okay.” We got up. “Hey, Mr. Rosenthal?”

“You’d better wipe the chocolate off your face.”

He wiped. “Mr. Rosenthal...how’d you know I like crushed nuts, and not whipped cream or a cherry?”

We spent a great deal of time together. I bought him a copy of a pulp magazine called Startling Stories and read him a story about a space pirate who captures a man and his wife and offers the man the choice of opening one of two large boxes—in one is the man’s wife, with twelve hours of air to breathe, in the other is a terrible alien fungus that will eat him alive. Little Gus sat on the edge of the big hole he’d dug, out in the empty lots, dangling his feet, and listening. His forehead was furrowed as he listened to the marvels of Jack Williamson’s “Twelve Hours to Live,” there on the edge of the fort he’d built.

We discussed the radio programs Gus heard every day: Tennessee Jed, Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, Superman, Don Winslow of the Navy . And the nighttime programs: I Love a Mystery, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade. And the Sunday programs: The Shadow, Quiet, Please, The Molle Mystery Theater.

We became good friends. He had told his mother and father about “Mr. Rosenthal,” who was his friend, but they’d spanked him for the Startling Stories, because they thought he’d stolen it. So he stopped telling them about me. That was all right; it made the bond between us stronger.