Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

The man was not positive, but he named a bus he thought I could take, and I did not check with any of the other passengers.

At my stop I got on the wrong bus. I should have asked the driver.

Waiting in the rain for a bus to take me back to where I had started, I thought for a moment that maybe the years with my friends had finally made me irresponsible too. Finally I got a cab and gave the driver the address. It cost me two dollars.

The home where Danny was seemed friendly enough, even in the rain. It was an old, sprawling, wooden building, but there were a lot of flowers, plenty of shade trees. It could have been a lot of places. I remember going to a funeral parlor not long ago. I had been apprehensive that the arrangements might be too stagey, but I was surprised to find I was really quite comfortable.

I told the volunteer I wanted to see Danny Lubell. She had to look up his name in her card file, and I guessed that not many people came to visit him. She called an attendant, who took me to the door of Danny’s room and then turned to leave.

“Shouldn’t you go in and tell him I’m here?”

“Don’t he know you?”

“I haven’t seen him in a long time. He doesn’t expect me.”

“It’ll be all right. He’s safe.”

I knocked softly, then with more force.

Danny opened the door. He was dressed in a suit. Except for the times we went to parties I couldn’t remember Danny in a suit.

“Hello, Danny,” I said.

“I’m nuts,” he said.

“You always were,” I said, and we went into the room.

He stood by the door. “You afraid for me to close this or anything?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” I said quickly.

“I don’t like people peering in at me. They visit their relatives and look into every damned room along the way.”

He seemed all right. The Sunday papers were sprawled out on the neatly made bed. Danny had probably been sitting in the chair by the window when I knocked.

“Back in town, hey?” he said.

“I’m visiting my mother.”

“Way it goes,” he said.

“Danny, you probably don’t remember, you only met him once. My cousin Lesley? He was killed.”

“The Marine?”

I nodded.

“Fat guy, shy around pussy-cat fur, joined the Marines. You told me about him. I remember. He was a beauty. The lousy people could have used a man like that. Yeah, I remember. Killed? Killed in the Marines?”

“He was on maneuvers.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

He went over and sat down on the bed on the papers. He looked at me for a long while.

“Bet you never thought you’d be seeing me in a place like this.”

“Belgium told me,” I said.

“ That creep,” he said.

“Joey Stowka. He told me to call him Joey Stowka.”

“Joey Belgium Creep. Insurance Representative. Sometimes I think I’m pretty well off in here, but if people buy insurance from Insurance Representative Joey Belgium Creep I’m sort of sorry I’m not out there. There must be a whole new crop of beauties roaming around loose.”

I laughed. I started to laugh hard.

“Hey, cut it out, cut it out. They’ll think it’s me. They’ll come in and feel the bumps on my head.”

“Hey, Danny,” I said, “what’s it all about? I mean, you seem fine. How long — you know — will you have to be here?”

“I ain’t made my mind up,” he said.

“You can get out when you want?”

“You hear about Ox?” Danny said.

“From Belgium.”

“How’s your school? They taking care of you?”

“I’m through with school, Danny.”

“But they took care of you okay? They kept you busy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You never did nothing but look, you know that?”

“I was crazy about you people.”

“Sure, sure you were. But you never did nothing but look.”

“You look too.”

“I look harder . I strained my eyes I looked so hard. Not you.”

“That’s what I was there for,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“I was supposed to look.”

“That’s right, chief.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. You tried to give us your jerky cousin Lesley. Poor Lesley, now he’s dead.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s dead too, your jerky cousin.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a pile of crap,” he said. “It’s no deal at all.”

“Oh, Danny,” I said, my heart tearing.

“It’s no damn deal at all. It’s a pile of crap.”

He didn’t say anything else. He sat there, on the bed, but wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to tell him I was sorry, but he didn’t answer me. After a while I stopped talking and we just sat there together. I sat with him half an hour, then I had to get out of “ there. “I’ve got to catch my bus,” I said.

“I’ve got to get started, Danny. Danny?” He looked up at me when I stood, but he didn’t say anything. I walked toward the door slowly, wanting him to say good-by. There was nothing but my own footsteps going to the door. I turned around to look at him for the last time.

Still he said nothing, but I did not miss the broad wink in the wild and knowing eye.

“It’s absurd,” Morty was saying to the chief, “three times around the world, attendance in eighty-two national capitals, fourteen days at one pole, eleven at the other — which reminds me: Did you know, you savage, there are four poles? Well, certainly. Read my write-up: ‘East Pole, West Pole.’ I got the idea from a popular song. That’s where the ideas are. I tell them and I tell them. Read my write-up. There’s a reprint in my knapsack. Anyway, it’s ridiculous, the basic paradox of my life: The places I’ve been . In the knapsack — you saw yourself: seventeen hand-drawn maps of unexplored territory. You know those white areas on globes — no, of course not; how would you — well, Morty Perlmutter’s been to most of them. Milonka? Check. Los Pappas, check. Frigtoony, check. Bishtumba, check. Bishtumba, check two times, once in summer, then in spring for the hatching of the slugs. It’s nothing, incidentally. Nature is nothing. Here it’s better. Wildnesses, wildnesses! Your Festival of Birth for example — those marvelous two weeks in Zum, our January, when all your women come to the clearing to have their babies in formation. Marvelous.”

“You must stay,” the chief said in Pragmatii, “for Lorp, your April.”

“I can’t. I can’t . It’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been to Gishlunt, to Kakos, to Schwatl, but never to New York City.”

“ Fa na batoogie New York City?” the chief asked absently, stringing another eye on the live-forever-have-fine-sons-win-many-noses necklace.

“A great city in my homeland, Chief, and I’ve never been there. Well, it’s easily understood. California, where I’m from, has its own ports, and then even with my patrimony there’s my terrific expenses and I’m always looking for bargain bays — Texas City, Texas; Tampa — No, no, not the turtle foot next to the pig ear, man. There , the gland , that should go with the finger. Forgive me, but I understand these things. For three months I studied with the greatest jeweler in the Baktivian jungle.”

“We have our own ways,” the chief said shyly.

“There it is — that’s the curse— that’s it . Relativism. When are you people going to learn there’s only one truth?”

The next day Perlmutter pitched camp by the river and waited for the immunization boat. There was always an immunization boat. One of the ways he chose his jungles was by first learning of the prevalent diseases there and then finding out if there were serums to combat them. If there were, there would be an immunization boat somewhere in the woodpile and that solved his transportation problem.