John Passos: Manhattan transfer

‘Theyve got five alarms in,’ a man said. ‘What do you think of that? Everyone of ’em on the two top floors was trapped. It’s an incendiary done it. Some goddam firebug.’

A young man sat huddled on the curb beside the gas lamp. Thatcher found himself standing over him pushed by the crowd from behind.

‘He’s an Italian.’

‘His wife’s in that buildin.’

‘Cops wont let him get by.’ ‘His wife’s in a family way. He cant talk English to ask the cops.’

The man wore blue suspenders tied up with a piece of string in back. His back was heaving and now and then he left out a string of groaning words nobody understood.

Thatcher was working his way out of the crowd. At the corner a man was looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past him he caught a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man looked up into his face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks and bright popeyes. Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold. The firebug. The papers say they hang round like that to watch it. He walked home fast, ran up the stairs, and locked the room door behind him. The room was quiet and empty. He’d forgotten that Susie wouldnt be there waiting for him. He began to undress. He couldnt forget the smell of coaloil on the man’s clothes.

Mr Perry flicked at the burdock leaves with his cane. The real-estate agent was pleading in a singsong voice:

‘I dont mind telling you, Mr Perry, it’s an opportunity not to be missed. You know the old saying sir… opportunity knocks but once on a young man’s door. In six months I can virtually guarantee that these lots will have doubled in value. Now that we are a part of New York, the second city in the world, sir, dont forget that… Why the time will come, and I firmly believe that you and I will see it, when bridge after bridge spanning the East River have made Long Island and Manhattan one, when the Borough of Queens will be as much the heart and throbbing center of the great metropolis as is Astor Place today.’

‘I know, I know, but I’m looking for something dead safe. And besides I want to build. My wife hasnt been very well these last few years…’

‘But what could be safer than my proposition? Do you realize Mr Perry, that at considerable personal loss I’m letting you in on the ground floor of one of the greatest real-estate certainties of modern times. I’m putting at your disposal not only security, but ease, comfort, luxury. We are caught up Mr Perry on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical inventions – telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles – they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in the forefront of progress… My God! I cant begin to tell you what it will mean…’ Poking amid the dry grass and the burdock leaves Mr Perry had moved something with his stick. He stooped and picked up a triangular skull with a pair of spiralfluted horns. ‘By gad!’ he said. ‘That must have been a fine ram.’

Drowsy from the smell of lather and bayrum and singed hair that weighed down the close air of the barbershop, Bud sat nodding, his hands dangling big and red between his knees. In his eardrums he could still feel through the snipping of scissors the pounding of his feet on the hungry road down from Nyack.

‘Next!’

‘Whassat?… All right I just want a shave an a haircut.’

The barber’s pudgy hands moved through his hair, the scissors whirred like a hornet behind his ears. His eyes kept closing; he jerked them open fighting sleep. He could see beyond the striped sheet littered with sandy hair the bobbing hammerhead of the colored boy shining his shoes.

‘Yessir’ a deepvoiced man droned from the next chair, ‘it’s time the Democratic party nominated a strong…’

‘Want a neckshave as well?’ The barber’s greasyskinned moonface poked into his.

He nodded.

‘Shampoo?’

‘No.’

When the barber threw back the chair to shave him he wanted to crane his neck like a mudturtle turned over on its back. The lather spread drowsily on his face, prickling his nose, filling up his ears. Drowning in featherbeds of lather, blue lather, black, slit by the faraway glint of the razor, glint of the grubbing hoe through blueblack lather clouds. The old man on his back in the potatofield, his beard sticking up lathery white full of blood. Full of blood his socks from those blisters on his heels. His hands gripped each other cold and horny like a dead man’s hands under the sheet. Lemme git up… He opened his eyes. Padded fingertips were stroking his chin. He stared up at the ceiling where four flies made figure eights round a red crêpe-paper bell. His tongue was dry leather in his mouth. The barber righted the chair again. Bud looked about blinking. ‘Four bits, and a nickel for the shine.’

ADMITS KILLING CRIPPLED MOTHER…

‘D’yous mind if I set here a minute an read that paper?’ he hears his voice drawling in his pounding ears.

‘Go right ahead.’

PARKER’S FRIENDS PROTECT…

The black print squirms before his eyes. Russians… MOB STONES… (Special Dispatch to the Herald ) Trenton, NJ

Nathan Sibbetts, fourteen years old, broke down today after two weeks of steady denial of guilt and confessed to the police that he was responsible for the death of his aged and crippled mother, Hannah Sibbetts, after a quarrel in their home at Jacob’s Creek, six miles above this city. Tonight he was committed to await the action of the Grand Jury.

RELIEVE PORT ARTHUR IN FACE OF ENEMY… Mrs Rix Loses Husband’s Ashes.

On Tuesday May 24 at about half past eight o’clock I came home after sleeping on the steam roller all night, he said, and went upstairs to sleep some more. I had only gotten to sleep when my mother came upstairs and told me to get up and if I didn’t get up she would throw me downstairs. My mother grabbed hold of me to throw me downstairs. I threw her first and she fell to the bottom. I went downstairs and found that her head was twisted to one side. I then saw that she was dead and then I straightened her neck and covered her up with the cover from my bed.

Bud folds the paper carefully, lays it on the chair and leaves the barbershop. Outside the air smells of crowds, is full of noise and sunlight. No more’n a needle in a haystack… ‘An I’m twentyfive years old,’ he muttered aloud. Think of a kid fourteen… He walks faster along roaring pavements where the sun shines through the Elevated striping the blue street with warm seething yellow stripes. No more’n a needle in a haystack.

Ed Thatcher sat hunched over the pianokeys picking out the Mosquito Parade. Sunday afternoon sunlight streamed dustily through the heavy lace curtains of the window, squirmed in the red roses of the carpet, filled the cluttered parlor with specks and splinters of light. Susie Thatcher sat limp by the window watching him out of eyes too blue for her sallow face. Between them, stepping carefully among the roses on the sunny field of the carpet, little Ellen danced. Two small hands held up the pinkfrilled dress and now and then an emphatic little voice said, ‘Mummy watch my expression.’

‘Just look at the child,’ said Thatcher, still playing. ‘She’s a regular little balletdancer.’

Sheets of the Sunday paper lay where they had fallen from the table; Ellen started dancing on them, tearing the sheets under her nimble tiny feet.

‘Dont do that Ellen dear,’ whined Susie from the pink plush chair.

‘But mummy I can do it while I dance.’

‘Dont do that mother said.’ Ed Thatcher had slid into the Barcarole. Ellen was dancing to it, her arms swaying to it, her feet nimbly tearing the paper.