Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

In three days he was well. It was painful for him to think of what the newspapers must have printed about him. Now there would be strange looks, perhaps words, from the other workers. He could imagine himself as he must seem to them. Quiet, sober, steady, the very man to nurse some wild, impossible dream. The gentle husband who one day slays his wife and small son, who rapes children, whose love nest is discovered. “Those quiet guys,” they would say, “they’re the ones to watch.” “Still waters,” they would say.

He dressed slowly. As he was tucking the medallion into his shirt he paused. There would be trouble. They would ask to see it. If he wore it exposed they would not say anything. It would shame them and they would avoid him. It was only the appearance of sanity that would drive them to ferret out the gauche detail, the unhealthy fact. Exposed, they would look away from it, or through it, pretending it was not there, as one looks away from a spastic in the street. He left the medallion on the dark denim shirt. It flared there like the sun in a night sky.

He returned to the docks. In the locker room the foreman looked at him peculiarly but said nothing. As he started outside the man called after him. “Hey,” he said.

He turned slowly. “Yes?”

“Next time you’re going to be out for a few days you’d better call in.”

“I will,” he said. “I certainly will.”

“That was some story about you in the papers,” the foreman said. “Well, just do your work and I got no complaint.”

“I will,” he said.

He worked quickly. From time to time he noticed some of the men watching him, but no one bothered him. The man he worked with worked as steadily as himself. At midnight it was time to quit. He heard the long, low whistle. “I guess that’s it,” he said to the man who worked beside him.

“That’s right,” the man said quietly.

He returned his gear to the locker room and went upstairs, coming out at the foot of an old wooden pier. A merchant vessel, its portholes blazing, was anchored at the pier. He looked up and saw some of the crew leaning against the railing. They were staring in his direction. As he walked along he was conscious of unusual activity on the dock. The shifts have changed, he thought. Women passed, looking at him. He saw small children huddled along the wharf. They looked like orphans. He walked on uneasily, tired.

Across the street, in front of a sailors’ bar, a group of cripples had convened quietly. Standing there, maimed, their canes and crutches a complex of tangled wood, they looked strangely like a team of athletes before the beginning of a game. Next to them was a group of beggars. They held boxes of pencils and faded paper flowers in their caps. One extended a torn jeweler’s card on which were mounted two red-glass earrings. A night clerk from one of the flophouses stared sullenly from beneath his green eye shade, a gaudy elastic sleeve band on each arm. A cook from the steamy kitchen of some restaurant, his apron stained with orange blood, leaned against a wall, smoking.

As he watched, the bars seemed to empty, the patrons — old sailors, whores, bums — filing silently into the street. They lined up in front of store fronts all the way down the block. They looked like people preparing to watch a parade. Here and there a tourist stood among them adjusting his camera lens, his empty case swinging at the ends of leather straps.

He heard a cry, triumphant, strong — clear and urgent in the silent street as a call for help. “There he is,” it shouted. He heard it again and saw an old woman, lame, her neck and face covered with running sores, push herself with her crutch away from the group of cripples, as one in a rowboat shoves away from the shore with an oar. “There he is,” she screamed again. The cry was amazingly strong in the old, wounded throat. It was delirious, transfixed. Others took it up and in their frenzy began to stumble forward, blindly shouldering each other out of the way.

It was him they meant.

They crowded toward him, one wave after another coming down toward him from the high curb. He stood in the cobbled street wondering if he dared to run. He looked about him. Others were coming from behind. He stood very still and raised his arms defensively, thinking they would fall upon him. His movement checked them. The ones in front stopped where they were and petitioned silence from the ones behind who had not seen his gesture. He heard their warnings for silence retreating into the deep fringes of the crowd ringed about him.

He stood now, immobile, directly in their center. He thought they meant to kill him. “What do you want?” he asked finally.

No one answered. They stared stupidly. One pointed to the medallion about his throat and the others looked in the direction of the pointing finger. He heard them gasp, shocked, thrilled.

“ What do you want ?” he repeated, raising his voice.

“We believe you,” the old crippled woman in the vanguard of the crowd called out.

“You’re what you say you are,” another said fiercely.

“You’re one of us. Tell them. Tell them. Tell them ,” cried an old man.

“Tell them about us,” a whore said ecstatically.

“It don’t have to be this way. It don’t have to be this way,” a drunk was crying.

“Please, sir,” a beggar urged.

“Prince,” a cripple murmured.

“King,” another whined.

“Lord!” a young woman, pregnant, drunk, whispered hoarsely.

He stared at them unbelievingly. Their broken faces, beatific, rapturous, were soft and stained with grief and love. They fixed their looks of patient ecstasy upon him, their weak sad freight of disease and despair and hope and love. He could feel their senseless love mounting steadily, building, bursting in upon him like waters that have split their banks. Feeling it, he knew that he would never be the same. It poisoned him, staining him like dirty, broken furniture in a room from which flood waters have retreated.

Suddenly an old man stepped tentatively forward. There was something familiar about his patient shuffle. It was the man he had stood next to outside the palace gates, the one who had wanted his face on the postage stamps. “Sir….” he began.

The rage, unfeigned, pure as poison, rattled in him. Instantly the chain of the medallion was in his hand and he was beating the man across his face, cutting him with the sharp shield shape. The man fell fragilely, sprawling at his feet in some final, terrible parody of petition. Helplessly he dropped the medallion, hearing the links and shield collapse goldenly in the silent street.

The mob seemed to undulate, to sway transfixed. Now they would kill him — now. Someone pressed forward. He heard the serene, leathery creak of wooden crutches. Now they would kill him. He waited, thinking irrelevantly of the fine wool woven from the precious shards in Khardov’s box, of his heavy leather shoes, untenanted, gathering dust in the closet in his shabby room, of the places he had seen, of tips left on glass tables under beach umbrellas on golden shores, of dusty carrels in quiet libraries, big, heavy books open on the ancient desks, the faded colored pictures of escutcheons across the huge pages like panels in a comic strip.

“Please, sir. Please, sir.” He looked down. The old woman, bent beneath him on her ruined legs, extended the medallion toward him.

He felt his rage, final, immense, filling him like fragments from a dropped glass spreading widely across a bare floor.

“Bastards. Bastards. You bastards, ” he roared.

On the medallion the lion; on the cobbled street himself: rampant, inflamed, enraged, furious with their golden hate.