Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

But Eugene took Pearl Harbor as a personal insult and for weeks raged against “the day of infamy.” Soon afterward he told us he was going into the “services.” From that day until V-J Day none of us saw Eugene again, and we thought, fantastically, that perhaps some branch of service had accepted him. I think it was 1943 before we found out that he had simply hidden himself in his apartment.

Eugene lived in an apartment on the second floor, and sure enough, not long after he went upstairs a flag with a blue star on it was popped into the window by his mother. After we learned what it meant we used to stand below that window with the blue star and look up at it, prouder of Eugene’s blue star than of any on the block. On V-J Day he came downstairs for the first time in four years.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four but he looked much older. The war had aged him.

“Hello, Eugene,” Danny said to him.

“Hello, fellows,” Eugene said, and he told us of an experience we soon knew by heart. In all the long war he had killed, he said, only one German. Eugene variously described the circumstances which led up to it. Sometimes Eugene was a soldier, sometimes a naval officer on loan to the army for a special mission — one gathered, to kill this German — and sometimes a pilot forced to land in enemy territory, but the final act, the killing, was always the same. Eugene had been forced to kill him at close range with his M-1. “He was so young,” Eugene would say. “But I had to do it. Him or me. You know how it is in a war. He asked for a cigarette when he was dying, and I didn’t even have one to give him. I would have given him, but I didn’t even have one.” Then he’d add sadly, “He was young. Just a kid.”

The rest of us would look down, pretending to be embarrassed. Finally somebody would say, “Aw, you would have given him, Eugene. You would have given him the whole pack if you’d had it.”

Anyway, after the war Eugene gradually brightened. He had gotten an Ike jacket somewhere and like many people in those days that was all you ever saw on his back. “Got to get a job,” he’d say. “Got to make up for the years I lost. Got to get a job from one of those dirty-rat black marketeers who cleaned up during the war safe at home. Got to get an angle.”

He was never really one of us, you understand. He was older and crazier and seemed not at all amused by his idiosyncracies, as though he suffered because of them even though he didn’t know it. But we were all keen on him. When he came by — walking so fast that you didn’t think he saw you, not walking his mother’s dog but pulling it behind him, its feet locked stiff, the neck resisting, the paws grinding along the cement sidewalk, until suddenly he was abreast of you and he stopped and turned quickly and said what he had to say about the black marketeers and then started again, yanking the dog along — Danny Lubell would say, “I admire him. I respect him. One thing about Eugene. He don’t stand still. Most nuts, they bury themselves in the sand. But not Eugene. Eugene moves along with the times. There’s a war, Eugene fights it in his bedroom. Peacetime, he’s a regular veteran worrying to get an angle. You got to give it to a man like that. He don’t stand still. He moves right along with the times.”

One night when he came by, Danny called to him, “Hey, Eugene, Eugene, where you been?”

He walked up close to examine us. He was wearing torn slacks and a dirty T-shirt. “Found an angle,” he said mysteriously. “Busy now, can’t talk much. Tell you quick and get along. Lots of details, lots to do. Sitting in the Roxy watching the picture. Next to me’s this beautiful babe. I think maybe she’s a movie star.

“ ‘Ain’t you Eugene Lepransky from The Bronx?’ she says.

“ ‘It’s me,’ I says.

“ ‘After the picture we’ll go to my place up the Hudson, I got a few friends coming over, we’ll dance,’ she says. Well, I’m trying to figure out how to get there on the subway, but when the picture’s over this big limousine pulls up, it’s a block long. It’s ‘Miss’ this and ‘Miss’ that from the chauffeur and I can see this is a fancy dame. We get in the car. Drive to this place up the Hudson. A palace! We go in. Butler at the door. ‘Hello there,’ he says. ‘Hello there, miss.’ What a place!

“ ‘You wait here, Eugene,’ she says. ‘I got to change into my beautiful ball gown. Then we’ll dance.’ So I’m waitin’ for her and she comes down, she’s got on this beautiful ball gown and we go into this ballroom. Chandeliers. Guys in tuxedos. We walk in right away everybody stops dancing and she nods to the guys in the band and she nods to me and we start to dance in the center all these people.”

“In your T-shirt? ” Danny asked him.

Eugene doesn’t pay any attention to him. “So we’re dancin’ along and I give her the nod. How long can a guy dance, you know? We go off in her car, me and her and this other couple. We’re in the back seat necking and up in front is the mayor and his girl. Just the four of us. Me and her and the mayor of the City of New York and his date. Necking.”

“Eugene, the mayor was there?” Danny asked.

“Sure. Very horny man, the mayor. So later on she tells the chauffeur to drive me home and that’s where I get the angle. Turns out the chauffeur is Black Matt.”

“Who?”

“Black Matt, the pirate. He fills me in on the angle. We’re going down the Amazon River on Black Matt’s boat to find the mysterious black pearls.”

“Eugene, Eugene,” Danny says, “you can’t cross streets.”

“Only Black Matt knows where they are. Dangerous. Very dangerous. We’ll be millionaires. Only thing, they got these jaguars that they jump on the boat they try to rip you up. Black Matt wants me to shoot the jaguars on account he heard how I’m a good shot from the War Department. I’m going to shoot the jaguars and the Pygmies that protect the black pearls on account they think they’re special holy eggs. Goddamn stupid Pygmies. Stupidest guy in the world is a stupid Pygmy. Lot of them in my outfit during the war. He’s got movies. Black Matt’s got movies. He showed me. Pearls as big as your fist. Black. You want to come along? I tell Black Matt you’re good shots he’ll probably take you. Need guys to lift the pearls. Heavy.”

“Would you do that for us, Eugene?” Danny asked him.

“Got to ask Black Matt. His boat.”

“Would we meet him?”

“Sure. Take you tomorrow.”

The next day we were out in front again and Eugene came along pulling his mother’s dog.

Danny called him over. “Eugene,” he asked him, “when are we going to meet Black Matt?”

Eugene looked angrily at Danny, then at the rest of us. We didn’t often try to trap him. Ox Hersh moved up in case there was trouble.

“Deal’s off,” Eugene said. “Black Matt died.”

In 1949 Eugene went after his mother with a knife and they had to take him away. Shortly afterward — this was in the summer — I decided I’d better start school. I went around to the gas station and told Danny about it.

“Sure,” he said. “Do that.”

“Danny,” I said, “I have to go to school.”

“Sure,” he said. “Look, I’m busy. Write me a letter.”

After that I didn’t see much of Danny and in a few weeks I went away to school.

I turned to my mother, who was still holding the photograph.

“I guess I’ll go downstairs,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

“What was all that about Lesley’s sister? You said maybe she’s engaged, maybe she’s not engaged.”

“They got a telegram Lesley was killed on one of those games they play like it was war.”