John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday

“Your stew is burning,” said Old Jingleballicks.

Doc leaped to the stove and pulled the pot from the burner. “You ate all the juice,” he said bitterly. “Of course it burned!”

“It was very good,” said Old Jay.

In the grocery Doc said, “Give me a dozen cans of beer.”

“Don’t you want the Bohemia?”

“Hell no!” Doc said. “I have a guest who—” And then an evil thought came to him. “A very interesting man,” Doc said. “Why don’t you come over and have a drink with us? Old—I mean, my friend can explain chess to you better than I can.”

“Why not?” said the Patrón. “Maybe I better bring a little liquor.”

“Why not?” said Doc.

Crossing the street, the Patrón asked, “You going to the party tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“I like you, Doc, but I don’t get you. You ain’t real,” said the Patrón.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, everything you do is—well, you’re like that chess. I don’t get you at all.”

Doc said, “Do you suppose nobody’s real to anybody else? You’re going to meet a man who can’t possibly exist.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said the Patrón nervously.

Old Jay shouted as they went up the stairs, “I bring you tidings of great joy. The human species is going to disappear!”

“This is Joseph and Mary Rivas,” said Doc. “Joseph and Mary, this is Old Jingleballicks.”

“Why can’t you rig a chess game?” the Patrón asked.

“Oh, you can, you can! Or at least you can rearrange your opponent. Comes to the same thing. Now, where was I? Oh yes—we are about to join the great reptiles in extinction.”

“Good!” said Doc.

“You mean there ain’t gonna be no more people?” said the Patrón.

“Right, young man. We have played the final joke on ourselves. Open the beer! Man, in saving himself, has destroyed himself.”

“Who’s destroyed?” the Patrón demanded.

“There must be chuckling on Olympus,” [93] Olympus: At 9,570 feet high, Mount Olympus is Greece’s tallest mountain. In Greek mythology, it was considered the home of the pantheon of principal Greek deities, led by Zeus, king of the gods. said Old Jingleballicks. “We go not to Armageddon [94] Armageddon: In the New Testament’s Book of Revelation (16:12–16), Armageddon is the site where forces of good and forces of evil assembled for an apocalyptic, climactic battle. but to the gas chamber, and we generate our own gas—”

Doc said, “I intended to work on my paper.”

“Good! I’ll help,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“Oh God! No! ” said Doc.

“Man has solved his problems,” Old Jay went on. “Predators he has removed from the earth; heat and cold he has turned aside; communicable disease he has practically eliminated. The old live on, the young do not die. The best wars can’t even balance the birth rate. There was a time when a small army could cut a population in half in a year. Starvation, typhus, plague, tuberculosis, were trusty weapons. A scratch with a spear point meant infection and death. Do you know what the incidence of death from battle wounds is today? One percent. A hundred years ago it was eighty percent. The population grows and the productivity of the earth decreases. In a foreseeable future we shall be smothered by our own numbers. Only birth control could save us, and that is one thing mankind is never going to practice.”

“Brother!” said the Patrón. “What makes you so damn happy about it?”

“It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.”

“I didn’t get one goddam word of that,” said Joseph and Mary.

Doc’s hands were full. In his left he held a small glass of whisky and in his right a can of beer. He sipped from the one and gulped from the other. “Every instinct tells me to stay out of this,” he said, “and every impulse makes me want to get into it.”

“Good!” said Old Jay. “Is that whisky?”

“Old Tennis Shoes,” said Joseph and Mary. “Want some?”

“Perhaps a little later.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a little later now,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“I guess you can hustle with anything,” said the Patrón. “I got a feeling I’m being took.”

“Well, the impulse wins,” said Doc. “You have forgotten one thing, Old Jingleballicks. Indeed, there have been species which became extinct through their own miscalculations, but they were species with a small range of variability. Now consider the lemming—”

“That is a very specialized case,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“How do you know we aren’t? What do lemmings do when their population exceeds the food supply? Whole masses of them swim out to sea and drown, until a balance of food and population is reached.”

“I deny your right to use lemmings,” said Old Jingleballicks. “Hand me the bottle, will you?”

“Deny and be damned!” Doc said. “Is the lemming migration a disease? Is it a memory? Or is it a psychic manifestation forced on part of the group for the survival of the whole?”

Old Jay howled back at him, “I will not be robbed of extinction! This is a swindle.” He turned to the Patrón. “Don’t listen to that man. He’s a charlatan.”

“He sure in hell is,” said Joseph and Mary admiringly.

Doc leveled a finger between the eyes of Old Jay, holding his whisky glass like the butt of a pistol. “Disease, you say? Infection? Down almost to nonexistence? But tell me, are not neurotic disturbances on the increase? And are they curable or does the cure spread them? Now you wait! Don’t you try to talk now. Do you suppose that the tendency toward homosexuality might not also have a mathematical progression? And could this not be the human solution?”

“You can’t prove it,” Old Jingleballicks cried. “It’s all talk—overemphasis. Why, you might as well accuse me of neurotic tendencies and be done with it!” His eyes brimmed with tears. “My friend, my thought-friend, my true friend,” he whimpered.

Doc said, “I wouldn’t even think of such a thing.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Certainly not.”

“When are you going to start dinner?” said Old Jingleballicks.

“You’ve eaten my dinner,” said Doc.

“I’ve got a fine idea,” said Old Jay. “While you start dinner, William and Mary can get a fresh bottle of whisky and I’ll set up the chessmen.”

“It’s not William and Mary, it’s Joseph and Mary.”

“Who is? Oh! My friend, I’m going to teach you the greatest of all games, the ethereal creation of human intelligence. Shall we sugar it up with a little side bet?”

“Why, you dishonest old fraud!” Doc shouted.

“Ten dollars, Mary?”

The Patrón shrugged his shoulders in apology to Doc. “You have to pay to learn things,” he said.

“Make it twenty-five,” Old Jingleballicks said. “You want to live forever?”

Doc opened a can of salmon and a can of spaghetti and stirred the two together in a frying pan. He grated nutmeg over it. Sadly he put the burned stewpot to soak in the sink.

A little after dark the Patrón went back to the grocery and sent Cacahuete to deliver a third bottle of whisky. Upstairs he joined the wetbacks as in advancing and retreating lines they danced the sad and stately measures of the Tehuanos. [95] Tehuanos: Inhabitants, predominantly Zapotec Indians, of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, southeastern Mexico. “Sandunga,” [96] “Sandunga”: “La Sandunga,” unofficial regional anthem of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, was written by governor and military commander Máximo Ramón Ortiz (d. 1855). It is a sensual, graceful dance song that expresses the grief of a Tehuana (Zapotecan woman) over the death of her mother. The song moves from overwhelming sadness to a sense of acceptance of her loss. they sang, “Sandunga mama mia…”