William Gaddis: J R

— Our counterfeit quarter, Julia, we wanted to show it to Mister Cohen. It was such a crude job, Mister Cohen, the copper showing right through at the edges, and one of our own tradesmen passed it on us. Can you see it, there on the mantel?

— I don’t think he can see a thing, Anne. But it wasn’t on the mantel this morning.

— That one sticks, Mister Cohen. You’d best use the side.

— It’s the side that sticks, Julia. He’d better use the back. Out through the kitchen Mister Cohen…

— And Mister Cohen…? Once you’re out there if you’ll just take a look? in the back? for the trees?

— And he might listen, Julia… pursued him through the presence of potatoes and green beans with strings like packing thread disintegrating with a smoked pork butt on the kitchen stove since near dawn, followed him as far as the corner of the house where a hanging gutter streaked clapboards and glass whenever it rained.

— I don’t think he’s paid us any attention. Just see him out there, my! He is in a hurry.

Avoiding an apple tree, its entire top blown out the year before, which redeemed itself now with a bumper crop of tasteless fruit in brave colors and curious shapes, — he looks like someone’s chasing him.

— He was certainly full of gossip, for a perfect stranger.

— I do wonder what James will have to say.

— James will say what he’s always said. He knows I’ve never believed it, for one.

— But even if you are right, Julia. If they weren’t married till Edward was born, he’s been Edward’s father all these years.

— You remember what Father used to say, the devil paying the piper for all the good tunes.

— Yes. There he goes now… The car crept up the drive past trees which appeared to stagger without even provocation of a breeze, rearing their splintered amputations in all directions, an atmosphere of calamity tempered, to the south, by a brooding bank of oak, by several high locusts serenely distinct against the sky in the west. — It was naughty of James.

— I hope he gets out through the hedge all right.

— Did you hear that crash last night? and the sirens? It’s a wonder they aren’t all killed.

— Listen…!

To the squeal of brakes, the car burst out into the world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows’ half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where it ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner where the road trimmed neatly into the suburban labyrinth and things came scaled down to wieldy size, dogwood, then barberry, becomingly streaked blood-red for fall.

Past the firehouse, where once black crêpe had been laboriously strung in such commemoration as that advertised today on the sign OUR DEAR DEPARTED MEMBER easy to hang and store as a soft drink poster, past the crumbling eyesore dedicated within recent memory as the Marine Memorial, past the graveled vacancy of a parking lot where a house, ravined by gingerbread, had held out till scarcely a week before, and through the center of town where all allusion to permanence had disappeared or was being slain within earshot by shrieking electric saws, and the glint of chrome that streaked the glass bank front across the resident image of bank furniture itself apparently designed to pick up and flee at a moment’s notice doors or no doors, opened, as they were now, to dispense the soft music hovering aimlessly about a man pasteled to match the furniture, crowding the high-bosomed brunette at the curb with — something, Mrs Joubert, something I’d meant to ask you but, oh wait a moment, there’s Mister Best, or Bast is it? Mister Bast…? He’s music appreciation, you know.

— He?

— What? Oh there, coming out? No, no that’s Vogel. Coach Vogel. You know him, the coach? Coach? Good morning…

— Good what? Oh, Whiteback. Good morning, didn’t see you. I just robbed your bank.

— I didn’t see you, called Mister Whiteback, and waved. — He what did he do? The sun in my eyes… It caught him flat across the lenses, erasing any life behind them in a flash of inner vacancy as he returned to — here, this young man coming here is Bast, you could probably tell he’s in the arts, can’t you. Mister Bast? I was just telling Mrs Joubert here, if she thinks she’s pressed for space you’ve had to rehearse all the way over to the Jewish temple since we had to take the cafeteria over for the driver training, right? Mister Bast is helping out Miss Flesch on her Ring to have it ready for Friday, the Foundation is sending out a team to give our whole in-school television program the once over and giving them a look at Miss Flesch’s Ring will give a real boost to the cultural aspect of, things. Not to slight your efforts Mrs Joubert. She has the new television course in, is it sixth grade social studies Miss Joubert? What’s in the paper bag, you haven’t robbed the bank, Mrs Joubert?

— This? No, it’s just money, she said, and shook the paper sack. — Not mine, my class. It’s what they’ve saved to buy a share in America. We’re taking a field trip in to the Stock Exchange to buy a share of stock. The boys and girls will follow its ups and downs and learn how our system works, that’s why we call it our share…

— In what.

— In America, yes, because actually owning it themselves they’ll feel…

— No, I mean what stock.

— That’s our studio lesson today deciding which one, if you want to look in on our channel. We have a resource film from the Exchange itself, too.

— Teaching our boys and girls what America is all about…

— Stick ’em up!

Bast’s elbow caught Mrs Joubert a reeling blow in the breast, she dropped the sack of coins and he stood for an instant poised with raised hand posed in pursuit of that injury before the flush that spread from her face to his sent him stooping to recover the sack by the top, spilling the coins from its burst bottom into the unmown strip of grass, and left him kneeling down where the wind moved her skirt.

— Poor child, why they let him run around loose…

— It’s the testing… Mister Whiteback withdrew a foot where his clocked ankle was nudged in pursuit of a dime, glancing down as it prospered to a quarter under Mrs Joubert’s expensively shod instep, and his voice was sheared off by an inhuman scream.

— What was that!… oh Mister Bast, I’m sorry, I didn’t hurt you…? She withdrew her heel from the back of his left hand as Bast got the nickel with his right, looking up from her flexed knee to start to speak.

— Those saws, they’re doing the trees in the next block, widening Burgoyne Street, said Mister Whiteback above. — I’ll drop you, if… Mister Bast? he retired in the box step of the rhumba now spilling from the bank out across the walk and into the grass where Bast was going at it as though finding money lost by someone else, — if you can just pick the rest of it up and drop it off for Mrs Joubert’s studio lesson?

— It was twenty-four dollars…

— And still get to your rehearsal, Mister Bast. To have it ready for Friday, we want to show this Foundation team how we’re motivating this cultural drive in our youngsters, it’s all in preparation for the cultural festival next spring you know, Miss Joubert… watch his hand there yes, to show we can make this cultural drive pay off like never before in mass consumers, mass distribution, mass publicity, just like automobiles and bathing suits…