Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Timmy you’re with me. Laura, get over there. Larry, Mary, Walt with me. Sylvia, Carole and Junior with Louie. That okay with you, Louie — five against five?”

“Fine with me.”

Henry moved the pillow from his face. The sides were unfair the way he looked at it — one team having two more girls than the other — and he was surprised Louie hadn’t put up a squawk. And really, this should be the healthy unperturbed attitude he should always take to their games — even squeezing a bit of it into the What the Native Children Do section of the Washington guidebook he was writing — if these kids weren’t the reason for most of his present troubles. He had come here, after having saved enough money as a waiter in New York, two months ago — in April, when the weather was still cool and dry, the windows of his cheap second-story apartment barely open and the neighborhood quiet. His goal was to write his fourth guidebook — a glib, witty first-person up-to-date account of the city’s high spots, night life, places to see, tour, eat at, drive by, and plainly avoid. In the first six weeks he completed most of his research, browsed through all the public buildings, monuments, memorials, museums and parks worth noting, and part of the day, when it was still quiet outside and the temperature comfortable, written what he considered to be the most exciting imaginative prose of any of his books.

Then the weather changed, the days and nights becoming hotter and stickier than he’d ever experienced. This was a valuable piece of information left out of most of the Washington books, and he already included it in the What to Wear section at the opening of the book. (DC’s weather is ideal for the gracious Southern clothing store owner. Here there are truly four distinct seasons — the fall and early spring being as delightful and pleasingly capricious as any city in the U.S. But the heat spells of late spring and summer? Let me inform you, dear travelers. It would be as insufferably stifling as the muggiest of Middle Eastern and Asian cities I’ve lived in if not for the ubiquitous air-conditioning.) And with the late May heat came jarring street noises, loud arguments and TV sounds from surrounding apartments, and the disturbances in the schoolyard of St. James: from the 8:25 morning lineup to the P.T. classes and after-school games of the neighborhood, kids. A week ago he decided that only at night and on Sundays would he ever find the peace to get work done at home. So during the day he now got up when the first few kids came into the yard, downed a quick breakfast and spent most of the time walking around the city, reading and napping in Rock Creek Park, editing copy there that he’d written the previous night when he’d drunk too much, and going to another tedious double feature in an air-conditioned theater.

All of a sudden it was silent outside. Maybe the kids had been kicked out of the yard or went to play somewhere else. He relaxed in bed, felt himself getting sleepy, for a while imagined himself playing Capture the Flag, freeing all the prisoners. Henry the Kid beating the other team home with the flag and being congratulated as he scored the winning point.

But a boy shook him out of his thoughts: “By the count of ten you pimps better be over that line or you lose the flag. One, two, three, four, five, six…”

Henry wanted to yell for the boy to get the hell away from his window.

“Capture the flag. Free him, free him,” a boy and girl screamed as Henry got out of bed. “I got the punk,” another boy shouted as Henry turned the shower on in the bathroom and put his head under it. When that didn’t cool him off and calm his nerves, he got in the tub and let the cold water rise around him.

He ducked his head into the water and thought God, if this isn’t nice, so nice, so perfect, so goddamn completely perfect, and came up for air, held his nose and dropped underwater again. It was so peaceful and comfortable in the tub that he pictured himself working here. He’d seen it done in a movie once — Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable sitting in a half-filled tub, typewriter and writing paper on a wood plank set up in front of him like a bed table, a cigarette stuck confidently to his bottom lip as he knocked off the last few lines of a prize-winning news article or novel. Confident and cheerful now himself, he scrubbed his face and hair with a washrag and through a soap bubble forming on his lips began to sing “Oh Suzanna.”

“Oh Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me. For I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”

It was all he knew of the song and he repeated those lines twice more and was giving out with what was possibly his highest range since his college chorus days, when a group of intentionally clashing voices outside joined in with him. He got up and slammed down the window. He still heard them mimicking him, so he threw on his terrycloth robe, drying himself with it as he went into the kitchen, and yelled from the partially opened curtains “Will you kids please stop!”

They continued to sing — the entire song.

“Didn’t you hear? Now you had your little joke, so can it.”

He couldn’t see them. They were behind a row of bushes inside the yard’s mesh fence, about fifteen feet from his building. The only other time he shouted at them was last week. They were fighting among themselves, whistling, screeching, cursing, and rattling the fence when one boy climbed it, then throwing pebbles at the boy when he was perched on top. “Stop that; you’re going to kill him,” Henry yelled, and the kids scattered and the boy climbed down on Henry’s side and ran away. Now he felt he was their target, and a regular sitting duck also. Having finished the “Oh Suzanna” song, they now baited him with the first stanza of “Lulu had a baby, she named him Sunny Jim.” By the time Lulu got excited and grabbed Jim by his cocktail, ginger ale, five cents a glass, Henry was in the bedroom, angrily zippering up his Bermuda shorts and prepared to show his face at the window for the first time to them and demand they stop bugging him.

They’d ended the song when he reached the living room, and didn’t follow it with anything. Relieved, he flopped into the easy chair with a book. It was one of the forty-odd history and guidebooks about Washington he’d borrowed from several public libraries — the main purpose being to condense what this writer and others had said into tiny sections of his own book. The title of his book, as his unpublished books on Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco has been similarly titled, was: Henry Sampson’s Modern Guidebook to Washington, DC . Below that would be the subtitle: “Your most perfect little companion to all places for all people. Meet the natives and their environment and be as comfortable and knowledgeable as you would in your own hometown.”

He never got to know these other cities that well, having only enough time and money to stay in Philadelphia for a long weekend and never having the bus fare to get to New Orleans. And he’d only spent a few hours in San Francisco — where he first came up with the idea for a series of guidebooks — before shipping out on a World War II troopship to Australia. The Washington book would be different. Not only was he getting a true feeling of the city but the writing was more informal, something his other books, which now seemed like staid travelogue scripts, entirely lacked. These would be the keys to getting it published. And publication would create such a demand for his previous books, once he changed them to first person and did a bit more personal research and lightened up on the language, that he didn’t think it’d be more than a few years before he’d be known as one of the most readable authorities on American travel. He was musing about all this — the money, notoriety, delicious free meals and luxurious hotel accommodations that would accompany his success — when he heard the children shouting outside again.