Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Louie, you’re the stupidest ass I ever seen,”

“You are, you mother.”

“My mother, what?”

“Just your mother, you mother.”

Henry tried to ignore their argument. He sat at his work table, typed “–37–” on the upper lefthand corner of the page, and continued typing and erasing for two minutes and six satisfying lines. “One especially intriguing area often missed by most tourists is DC’s own Chinatown, which is only a stone’s throw from the Capitol Building. It’s made up of an assortment of exotic shops run by native Chinese, some of the wares, a reliable source informed me, reputed to be smuggled straight from Red China, and under the very noses of your congressmen, no less! One particularly hospitable Mandarin restaurant I had several outstanding dinners at is the…” He was looking through his dining-out notebook, which didn’t list the restaurants he’d eaten in but only the more expensive places he’d jotted down many of the dishes and prices from the menus posted out front, when he heard another shouting match in the schoolyard.

“I said get your freaking hands off me, Ronnie,” a girl said.

“What’re you, crazy?” the boy said. “I wouldn’t touch you with a cruddy pole.”

“Yeah, I bet,” she said; “On your mother’s life,” he answered, and so it went, till Henry ripped the page out of the type-writer and bunched it up and flung it to the floor. That’s it,” he said, and he rushed out of the apartment and down the service stairs to the rear entrance. He calmed his rage once he got outside, moved closer to the schoolyard till he stood under the plaque above the door in the fence — a mutilated crucified Christ dangling over the school’s name and motto, both written in Latin.

“Pighead Sylvia’s got a hole in her sock,” a boy was singing to “Glory, Glory, Halleluiah,” but stopped when Henry entered the yard.

“No need to stop,” he said. “You have a pretty good voice, in fact, although the words are a bit nasty. Anyway, I only came down from that building there to ask if you kids could tone it down some.”

They all stepped back a few feet. He smiled and tried to think of something to say that would make them trust him. His eyes settled on tough-looking girl with messy hair and holes in her socks. Has to be Sylvia, he thought, laughing to himself. And the short kid there is probably Junior. He was trying to determine which ones were Ronnie and Louie when a boy came forward and said “Yeah, and who chose you to tell us what to do — God?”

Which intolerable bastard is he? Henry thought, but said “And who might you be, my good friend?”

“I might be Ronnie Peterson, that’s who, and I’m not your good friend.” He turned around to the others and squeezed his nose, and they all laughed uneasily.

Of course. The more the boy talked and swaggered, he knew it could only be Ronnie; the one who yelled the loudest, complained the longest, had the foulest mouth, constantly tried to feel up Sylvia and was always bullying someone. How many times had he heard his ugly shrill mouth, pictured these pugnacious mannerisms. Ten pages. Ten pages at least he could be advanced in his book if it wasn’t for this one kid alone.

“Look, Ronnie…that’s your name, right? What are you — ten, eleven, twelve? So you’re old enough to understand what I mean. Because every day I’m awakened by your loud games—”

“I’m not here any morning but Saturday and Sunday, so don’t be blaming me for those other days.”

“Who’s blaming anyone? I’m just saying I’ve got a very important government night job, and sleeping Sunday morning means a lot to me.”

“Well, I don’t know, mister, because Sundays this yard’s a public playground for everybody, and today’s Sunday.”

The yard’s also part of a religious school, and because today’s Sunday you should treat it with particular respect.”

“It isn’t my school.”

“It’s others’, though — Catholic people. And it means a kind of holiness to them that took almost two thousand years to create.”

“Well, school’s closed today, so it isn’t nothing.”

That’s right,” a boy said, getting next to Ronnie.

Henry tried to put the voice and face of this boy together. Then it clicked and he blurted out “Timmy Santangelo.”

“How’d you know?” the boy said, then glanced at Ronnie. Ronnie returned his dumbfounded look.

“Don’t be surprised,” Henry said. “I’ve been hearing you kids so long, I’m bound to know your names. Let’s see now,” and he ran his finger across his bottom lip as he observed a tall thin girl. “You’re Mary,” he said, and she nodded. “Mary…? Mary…?”

“Mitchell,” she said, covering her face with her hands and giggling.

“Mary Elizabeth Mitchell.” Some of the other kids inched up as if they wanted to be identified too.

Henry pointed at one of the boys, closed his eyes and thought Who the hell could this one be? Louie? Maybe Walt, or Larry, even. He knew it’d floor them all if he could say the boy’s name when he opened his eyes.

That’s Junior, mister,” Ronnie said. “And the little shrimp next to him is Walt. And after Walt is Louie and Carole. But what do you want to know for — you a cop?”

“Far from it,” he said, wishing Ronnie had given him a few more seconds. “And also, I think I deserve something like a little more respect from you. After all,” and he stepped closer to Ronnie, who suddenly looked frightened and yelled “Run, you dumb pimps, run,” and all of them except Ronnie and Timmy took off and stopped about twenty feet away.

“Why’d you tell them to run?” Henry said. “I’m not after any of you.”

“Just take a walk, mister.”

That goes double for me,” Timmy said, catching his thumbnail under his top front teeth and snapping it at Henry.

Jesus, he thought, he’s seen cocky kids before, but these two take the limit. So what does he do now? If he turns around, they’ll jeer him till he reaches his building, and then let him have it under his window for a while, embarrassing him in front of his neighbors and of course prevent him from getting any kind of work done. All he can do is stand firm where he is and let them know he means no harm, though this time directing his entreaties to the other kids.

“Listen, boys and girls,” he yelled at them. The reason I came down here—”

“Yeah, for what?” Ronnie said.

“Was I talking to you? — The reason I came down here,” he shouted over Ronnie’s head, “was because—”

“Ah, you already said that, so stop it.”

He lunged forward, just to grab Ronnie’s arm and maybe cover his mouth till he finished what he’d started to say, but Ronnie dodged out of his reach and Henry tripped and fell. Lying on the ground, he heard the slapping of the boys’ sneakers against the asphalt as they ran to their friends. When he looked up, all of them were laughing and pointing at him. He thought he must really look a sight. What with his knees scraped and arms dirty and blood trickling out of his stinging right hand, which had broken his fall. Really looking like the prize patsy of all time. He wiped his hand with a handkerchief, dabbed the knee cuts and tied the red-blotted rag around one of them. He stood up, laughing along with the kids.

“I feel like a real kid again, with my knees scraped and all,” he said to Ronnie and Timmy, who had moved to within ten feet of him.

“Well, you don’t look like one.”

“He looks like a donkey,” Timmy said, and repeated it to the others. One of them hee-hawed back.

“Hey,” Henry said. “When I was your age we also used to give the older guys the business. But when we went too far with it we also knew they had a perfect right to pin back our ears. So how about us calling a truce now and you kids running up to Columbia Road and having a soda each on me — okay?”