Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“But do you have to play in the same spot all day?”

“I didn’t. We all went home for lunch and came back only after dinner.”

“Look, I don’t mean to seem unreasonable, kid, but isn’t it a trifle late for you and your ball to be out?”

“I got permission. Tomorrow’s no school. And listen, mister, you’re as drunk as can be. I can even smell it from here, so why should I listen to you?”

“Don’t get fresh with me, Ronnie. Take some advice and don’t act so tough when your friends aren’t around to back you up.”

“I don’t need them. You don’t scare me. And don’t be coming nearer or I’ll get my dad to break your nose in.”

“Say, I’d like that. Go on, call him — well, go ahead,” not sure if he was up to facing the boy’s old man if he did take his bluff. “Because I’d really like to speak to Mr. Peterson about his dear considerate son.”

“Maybe later. Stick around. He’ll be here soon to get me.” He poised the ball over his head, threw it against the wall, and retrieved it effortlessly when it bounced back to his chest.

“Now didn’t I ask you nicely just before? I mean, don’t you think you’re just banging the ball out of spite.”

“Shove off, mister,” a slight quiver in his voice.

“Well, what, then? I mean, what do you want from me — my blood?”

“ Meada du sombrero , mister — you know what that means in Spanish?” Henry shook his head, and Ronnie said “‘Go shit in your hat.’”

He swirled around and threw the basketball against the wall, didn’t see Henry’s fist coming down on his face. The blow caught him square in the cheek and sent him sprawling. The ball rebounded past them, banged against the fence with a ping and rolled jerkily a few more feet before stopping. Henry charged over to him, and was pulling at Ronnie’s shirt and hair when a woman screamed behind him. He jumped up, looked around as if others were watching him, looked at Ronnie, whose eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving, and ran to his building.

Someone pounded on his door half an hour later. “Mr. Sampson? It’s the police. I want you to open the door.”

“Be there in a jiffy.” He was sitting in the easy chair, downing his last beer. The pounding became more insistent. Henry yelled out “I have to put on some clothes before opening up, you know.”

“Just open it now.”

He unlocked the door. Two policemen were in the hallway, and behind them two men in baseball uniforms held up a woman by her underarms. She was sobbing and sweating and saying in a Southern drawl That’s him, that’s him. That’s the filthy crazy bastard I saw nearly kill my boy.” The ballplayers just stared at their spikes, as if they’d been tapped at random by the cops to hold this woman and didn’t want to get any more involved than that.

Henry was so sickened by her wet pulpy face that he had to turn away. He also didn’t like her pointing at him as if he were a common ignorant dipso like herself who’d just committed an unprovoked brutal act. Because there were things to explain. Plenty of things — all proving how justified his attack on her son had been and why it could be labeled a clear case of self-defense.

She pulled away from the men and tried to punch Henry. A policeman grabbed her wrists and tried calming her down. He said “Yes, ma’am…All right, ma’am…Now everything’s going to work out just dandy, ma’am, so you take it easy, you hear?” The other policeman took down Henry’s name and address and began asking a lot of questions Henry found to be embarrassing. Yes, he was not a permanent resident. No, he could not say he had any present visible means of support other than for a little savings. Yes, it’s possible he struck the face of a boy known as Ronald Gregory Peterson. Yes, he had a pretty good idea why he did it. No, he’d never been in trouble in Washington before. Yes, he might have had some difficulties with law enforcement agents in other cities.

And then other questions, some even more disturbing, Henry feeling too dizzy and confused to answer them and really only thinking of a paragraph he wrote last week for the Tips the Natives Know section about the ruthless almost Gestapo-like tactics of a lot of the police here and which he’d have to revise. Because he had to maintain more than a semblance of truth and fairness in his books if they were to be worthy of publication and sell. And these two here — the first policemen he’d spoken to in this city — showed courtesy and considerable understanding and tact, far unlike that fat slobbering Texas cop who arrested him on a street a year ago, when all Henry had wanted from several prostitutes and strippers were statistics and humorous anecdotes for the Strictly Male section of his uncompleted Houston-Galveston book. (Tourists concerned with the current widely discussed issue of law and order in our nation’s major cities will be pleased to learn that the DC police — and this opinion is not only mine but that of many very discerning and influential Capitol Hill friends — is probably the most honest, intelligent and well-mannered municipal protective force in America. Besides being unusually effective in keeping the city’s crime rate down beyond a reasonable low, considering the poverty that exists in some outlying areas here, the police are also helpful and friendly to residents and tourists alike in dealing with matters of a noncriminal nature. In a way, they remind me of those handsome white-uniformed Carabinieri in Naples and Rome. For whenever I approached one for street directions or really any topical or historical information, he would first salute me, smile, even bow a little, and then very graciously and patiently offer his help.)

Always home for dinner on time, shirt smelling of work: sweat, from all the teeth he pulled out, and the chemicals he used there for plates and fillings.

Scrubbed his hands with a nail brush before sitting at the table—“My fingers have been in all sorts of mouths, so need two to three washes”—my mother at one end, he at the other, various numbers of kids on either side.

“Eat all your plate,” he’d say to me. “When I was your age we felt lucky to get one square a day.”

Not “What happened at school today?” but the job I had after.

“Everything still good there? Getting to work on time and not giving them any trouble? You never want to lose or quit a job before you have another one. How much you making now? They don’t hint you’re due for a raise soon? If you do have a few extra bucks a week hanging around in your pocket, you don’t think it’s time you started contributing to the house? I did at ten and never stopped. It costs us a small fortune to bring up seven kids.”

When they didn’t want us to know what they were saying at the table, they spoke Yiddish. He’d taught it to her so she could speak to his mother. His father, a weaver and darner, had spoken a broken English, but only Yiddish at home.

“Go lie on your stomach in a bathtub,” was one of the curses he translated for us. Others: “May his head get so small to fit through the eye of a needle. May the rest of his life be like a hand caught in a jackal’s jaw. May he have no sons to say kaddish for him, and if his wife does give him one, then a son who turns into a goy.” I didn’t understand why he found them so funny.

“Mockey Jew bastard” was the worst thing he could call a person.

“Not at the table, Labe — please,” my mother would say.

“Who he?” he often said when we were speaking about someone he didn’t know. “Who is he?” I once said, and he said “You too? God, won’t any of my kids ever know when I’m joking?”

Home with newspapers he found on subway seats and in public trash cans, yellow with piss a couple of times and once with spit on it, but he said “So what’s the big deal? You just tear that part of the paper off and read the rest. And look what I’ve saved over the years by not buying the afternoon dailies: several trees.”