John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday

Sweet Thursday Revisited

Again it was a Sweet Thursday in the spring. The sun took a leap toward summer and loosed the furled petals of the golden poppies. Before noon you could smell the spice of blue lupines from the fields around Fort Ord.

It was a sweet day for all manner of rattlesnakes. On the parade ground a jackrabbit, crazy with spring, strolled in March Hare [125] March Hare: The March Hare appears in chapter seven, “A Mad Tea-Party,” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by British writer and mathematician Charles L. Dodgson (1832–98). madness across the rifle range and drew joyous fire from two companies before he skidded to safety behind a sand dune. That jackrabbit’s moment of grandeur cost the government eight hundred and ninety dollars and gladdened the hearts of one hell of a lot of soldiers.

Miss Graves awakened breathless with expectancy. She sang a scale in half-tones and found that her voice was back and all was well with the world. And she was right. At eleven o’clock the Monarch butterflies came boiling in from across the bay and landed in their millions on the pine trees, where they sucked the thick sweet juice and got cockeyed. The butterfly committee met in emergency session in the fire house and got out the crowns of fairies and the long brown underwear of Indians. The mayor pro tem of Pacific Grove wrote a proclamation for the evening paper.

The tide was very low that morning, preparing for the spring tides, and the warm sun dried the seaweed so that billions of flies came on excursion to feed.

People felt good. Judge Albertson discharged the seer on the recommendation of the Safeway manager.

Dr. Horace Dormody whistled through his mask over an appendectomy and told a political joke to the anesthetist, but he didn’t mention Doc’s broken arm. A patient’s problems, no matter how funny, were sacred to Dr. Horace. But he couldn’t help chuckling discreetly to himself now and then.

How did the word spread about Doc’s arm? Who knows? Fauna heard it with her crullers. Alice, Mabel, and Becky got it with their orange juice. The Patrón heard it from Cacahuete, who thereupon rushed to the beach and played three loud and uninhibited choruses of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” using six changes of key.

Wide Ida was siphoning Pine Canyon whisky into Old Crow bottles when she heard it.

Mack and the boys had the news early, and it gave them something pressing to do.

Suzy opened up the Poppy that morning. The counter was crowded with breakfasters who dawdled over coffee. It was well into the morning before Suzy heard that Doc had broken his arm. And then she couldn’t do anything about it because Ella was getting a permanent. But after she heard it some mid-morning customers got curious service from a Suzy who looked blankly over their heads when they spoke to her. She called Mr. MacMinimin Mr. Gross, and she called Mr. Gross “you” and served his eggs straight up which sickened him.

Mack was first on the scene. He didn’t even put on his shoes. He regarded the new cast, which still hadn’t cooled off, and listened to the only explanation Doc could think of—that he had got his arm caught between the cot and the wall.

“What you going to do?” Mack asked.

“I don’t know. I have to get south, I have to!”

Mack was about to make an offer when a thought came to him that made him say, “Maybe something’ll turn up.” He bolted for the Palace Flop house.

Once there, he went to Hazel’s bed and found it pristine and unwrinkled.

“He ain’t been in,” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well, what do you think of that?” Mack said with admiration. “Why, the sweet son-of-a-bitch!”

Mack went out to the cypress tree and crawled under its low hanging limbs, and he dragged Hazel out the way you’d drag a puppy from under a bed and half carried him up to the Palace Flop house.

Hazel was far gone in emotional fatigue. “I had to,” he said hopelessly.

“Anybody seen Suzy?” Mack asked.

“I seen her go to work early,” said Eddie.

“Well, you better go break the news to her. Do it offhand,” said Mack. “Now, Hazel, how’d you do it?”

“You mad with me?”

“Hell no,” said Mack. “’Course we don’t know how she’ll work out, but it’s a step in the right direction.” He turned to the two Whiteys. “I want you should notice Hazel didn’t bust Doc’s leg. That was good judgment. Doc can walk but he can’t work. You, Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 2, “I want you should get over to Doc’s and hang around. If anybody offers to drive him down to La Jolla you take care of it. Where’s the indoor-ball bat?”

“I throwed it in the bay,” said Hazel.

“So that’s what it was! Whitey, you get yourself a couple of feet of gas pipe.”

Hazel went into collapse. Mack sat on the edge of his bed and placed and replaced cold damp rags on Hazel’s feverish brow.

Hazel struggled for speech. “Mack,” he said, “I can’t do her. I don’t care if the stars or even the cops say I got to, I can’t do her. I ain’t got the poop.”

“What you talking about? You already done her.”

“I don’t mean that. You tell Fauna she got to get somebody else for President of the United States.”

Mack stared down at him in amazement. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I thought you’d forgot.”

“I practiced,” said Hazel brokenly. “I don’t want to let nobody down, Mack, but I just ain’t no good at it. Try and get me off, will you, Mack? Please? Pretty goddam please?”

Mack’s eyes brimmed with compassion. “Well, you sweet bastard,” he said. “You poor little rabbit. Don’t you worry. Ain’t nobody going to force you. You done noble stuff. Wasn’t nobody with guts but you.”

“It ain’t oysters,” Hazel said. “Hell, I could do that. I’d eat old socks if I had to. It’s just—the job’s too big for me. I’d mess up the whole country.”

Mack said, “You just lay there, Hazel baby, Mack’s going to take care of it. There ain’t nobody brave as you. Whitey,” he said to Whitey No. 1, “you set here on Hazel’s bed and kind of pet him. Don’t let him get up until I get back.” And Mack hurried out.

“You got to do something and do it quick,” Mack said to Fauna. “S’pose Hazel gets another noble idea—why, hell, he might kill somebody.”

“Yeah,” said Fauna, “I can see how it is. Just let me get my stuff together. You think he’d like a nice monkey head?”

“He’d love it,” said Mack. “He needs it.”

Fauna held her chart in front of Hazel’s eyes. “Anybody can make a mistake,” she said. “They was a fly speck on the chart. Saturn wasn’t in the bicuspid at all.”

Hazel said suspiciously, “How do I know you ain’t malarkying me now just to make me feel good?”

“How many toes you got?”

“I counted them—nine.”

“Count them again.”

Hazel slipped off his shoes. “Looks like the same as before,” he said.

“Look at that little toe kind of bent under. Hell, Hazel, I may of made a mistake with a fly speck, but you miscounted your toes! You got ten. One bent under.”

A slow smile began to spread over Hazel’s face, a smile of relieved delight. Then for a moment the shadow of worry came back. “Who you think they’ll get instead of me?”

“Nobody knows,” said Fauna.

“Well, he better be good,” said Hazel ominously. And then he abandoned himself to pure relief. “ ‘I got a little shadow that goes in and out with me,’ ” he sang.

Fauna rolled up her chart and went home.

Just before noon the expressman picked his unaccustomed way up to the chicken walk to the Palace Flop house.

“I got a great big crate for you guys,” he said. “I ain’t got no call to deliver it up a rope ladder. Come on down and get it.”