Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

A young Negro girl came by, pushing a baby carriage. She sat down on Feldman’s bench.

Feldman smiled at her. “Is your baby a boy or a girl?” he asked her.

The girl laughed brightly. “My baby an elevator operator downtown. This one here is a white child, mister.”

“Oh,” Feldman said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Feldman wondered whether she would get up now, whether she had taken him for one of the old men who sit in parks and tamper with the healthy they meet there.

He got up to go. “ ’Bye, mister,” the girl said.

He looked to see if she was mocking him.

He started toward the corner. He could catch a bus there. With a panic that startled the worm sleeping in his stomach and made it lurch forward, bringing him pain, he realized that in leaving the hospital he had given no thought to where he would go. He understood for the first time that when he had gone into the hospital not to be cured but to die, he had relinquished a sort of citizenship. Now he had no rights in a place given over to life. People did not come back from the grave. Others wouldn’t stand for it. He could not even stay in the park, unless he was to stay as one of the old men he had for a moment feared he had become.

He could go home, of course. He could kiss his wife and explain patiently to her what had happened to him. He could tell her that his disease had been a joke between the doctor and himself — not a joke in the sense that it didn’t really exist, but merely a sort of pale irony in that while it did exist, it did not behave as it had in others; that he was going to die, all right, but that they must both be patient.

He saw a large green and yellow bus halted at the stop light. He did not recognize its markings, but when it came abreast of him he got on. He sat up front, near the driver. When the bus had made its circuit two times, the driver turned toward Feldman.

“Okay, mister, end of the line.”

“What?”

“You should have slept it off by this time. End of the line. Far as we go.”

“But there are still people on the bus.”

“Sorry. Company rule.”

“If I pay another fare?”

“Sorry.”

“Look,” he started to say, but he was at a loss as to how to complete his thought. “All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

He got off and saw that he had come to a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. He could not remember ever having been there before. It was a factory district, and the smoke from many furnaces forced on the day, still in its early afternoon, a twilight haze. He walked down a block to where the bare, unpainted shacks of the workers led into a half-commercial, half-residential section. He saw that secured between the slate-colored homes was more than the usual number of taverns. The windows in all the houses were smudged with the opaque soot from the chimneys. The brown shades behind them had been uniformly pulled down almost to the sills. Feldman sensed that the neighborhood had a peculiar unity. Even the deserted aspect of the streets seemed to suggest that the people who lived there acted always in concert.

The porches, their peeling paint like dead, flaking skin, were wide and empty except for an occasional piece of soiled furniture. One porch Feldman passed, old like the rest, had on it a new card table and four brightly chromed, red plastic-upholstered chairs, probably the prize in a church bingo party. The self-conscious newness of the set, out of place in the context of the neighborhood, had been quickly canceled by the universal soot which had already begun to settle over it, and which, Feldman imagined, through that same silent consent to all conditions here, had not been wiped away.

Behind the window of each tavern Feldman passed was the sign of some brewery. They hung, suspended neon signatures, red against the dark interiors. He went into one of the bars. Inside it was almost dark, but the room glowed with weird, subdued colors, as though it were lighted by a juke box which was burning out. The place smelled of urine and beer. The floor was cement, the color of an overcast sky.

There were no other men in the tavern. Two women, one the barmaid, a coarse, thick-set woman whose dirty linen apron hung loosely from her big body, stood beside an electric bowling machine. She held the hands of a small boy who was trying to intercept the heavy silver disk that the other woman, probably his mother, aimed down the sanded wooden alley of the machine.

“Let me. Let me,” the boy said.

The mother, a thin girl in a man’s blue jacket, was wearing a red babushka. Under it, her blond hair, pulled tightly back on her head, almost looked wet. The child continued to squirm in the older woman’s grasp. The mother, looking toward a glass of beer set on the edge of the machine, spoke to the woman in the apron. “Don’t let him, Rose. He’ll knock over the beer.”

“He wants to play.”

“I’ll break his hands he wants to play. Where’s his dime?”

Feldman sat down on a stool at the bar. The barmaid, seeing him, let go of the child and stepped behind the bar. “What’ll you have?” she said.

“Have you sandwiches?”

“Yeah. Cheese. Salami. Ham and cheese.”

“Ham and cheese.”

She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a dusty plastic pie bell and brought it to him. “You must be new around here. Usually I say ‘What’ll you have?’ the guy answers ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ It’s a joke.”

Feldman, who had not often drunk beer even before his illness, suddenly felt a desire to have some. “I’ll have some ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ ”

The woman drew it for him and put it next to his sandwich. “You a social worker?” she asked.

“No,” Feldman said, surprised.

“Rose thinks every guy wears a suit he’s a social worker,” the blond girl said, sitting down next to him. “Especially the suit don’t fit too good.” The child had run to the machine and was throwing the silver disk against its back wall. The machine, still activated, bounced the disk back to him.

“Don’t scratch the surface,” the woman behind the bar yelled at him. “Look, he scratches the surface, the company says I’m responsible. They won’t give me a machine.”

“Petey, come away from the machine. Rose is gonna break your hands.” Looking again at Rose, she said, “He don’t even carry a case.”

“Could be he’s a parole officer,” Rose said.

“No,” Feldman said.

“We ain’t used up the old one yet,” the blond woman said, grinning.

Feldman felt the uncomfortable justice of these speculations, made almost as though he were no longer in the room with them. He finished his beer and held up his glass to be refilled.

“You got people in this neighborhood, mister?”

“Yes,” he said. “My old grandmother lives here.”

“Yeah?” the woman behind the bar said.

“What’s her name?” the blond girl asked suspiciously.

Feldman looked at the thin blonde. “Sterchik,” he said. “Dubja Sterchik.”

“Dubja Finklestein ,” the girl said. She took off her blue jacket. Feldman saw that her arms, though thin, were very muscular. She raised her hand to push some hair that had come loose back under the tight caress of the red babushka. He saw that the inside of her white wrist was tattooed. In thin blue handwriting, the letters not much thicker than ink on an ordinary envelope, was the name “Annie.” He looked away quickly, as though inadvertently he had seen something he shouldn’t have, as though the girl had leaned forward and he had looked down her blouse and seen her breasts.

“I don’t know nobody named Dubja Sterchik,” Rose said to him. “Maybe she drinks across the street with Stanley,” she added.