Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

She looked up and squinted at him, her squeezed eyes enormous and burning behind her rimless, sun-reflecting glasses.

“I can but I won’t,” she said.

He stood up, wiping his forehead. “In that case I must be moving on, hi ho Silver.”

On his right as he went out was a statue of Horace Greeley. “ You go West,” he told the statue. The nerve of that guy, he thought.

He walked down Broadway.

In the garment district he looked up at the huge windows, enjoying the familial, personal poetry of the names of the firms lettered there.

Broadway moved into the East Side at 23rd Street, and he began to walk faster. Now he no longer looked around him but moved quickly, excited and urgent and nervous.

At 17th Street he rushed to the picket railing around the square and closed his hands tightly about two iron-dark spears. His heart pumped violently. The muscles in his throat, contracting, gagged him. He entered Union Square Park .

It was an open-air forum, the last in New York, one of the last in the world.

Morty had known about Union Square but until now had stayed away from it, saying it, savoring the idea of it. It would not be like Hyde Park in London, where a man would take your picture on a soapbox for money. It would not be like the Bughouse Square in Chicago, where the high-school boys, smug, mock innocence like jam on their faces, came to bully the speaker, to grab at his pants from behind. This was different. This was serious.

There were no boxes. That made the difference. It kept the exhibitionists away. He remembered Kachoa, where the king had no throne. He met you at eye level. There the laws were wise, complex fiats issuing as naturally as rote morning salutations between friends. He knew where he would have to come to hear truth when he read about a New York City ordinance that permitted speech-making in the park so long as the speakers were level with their hearers.

It was not yet eleven, but already the men had begun to gather. They were men just past middle age, in blue work shirts, or tieless in white short-sleeved shirts, the collars spread neat and wide as bibs over the lapels of their jackets. They lounged on benches with newspapers in their laps or sticking out of wide, slack side pockets in their suit coats. It alarmed him to hear them question each other about absent speakers and to see their smiles as each name invoked some old-cronied recognition. If they knew the truth, why, he wondered, would they come back? Then he thought: Why, to relish it; they return to relish it, like old men warmed by any familiar, mutual memory.

Men continued to gather. They came into the park and waved at acquaintances or stopped to chat with friends with the odd, dignified courtesy of legislators in a cloakroom. There was about the place — in addition to expectancy, which was what Morty brought there — a sort of placidity: an air among them of having shared together something immense and final and incorruptible. Though he had never seen any of these men before, he could almost tell which of them had been labor agitators in the thirties, which had been hit by policemen, or been cellmates, or conspired together in basements.

An hour had passed and still no one had begun formally to address the crowds. Just after noon Morty leaned toward the man next to him on the bench.

“When does everything begin?” he asked.

The man didn’t look at him when he answered. “Too many regulars,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “Somebody who’s never heard it has to be around to listen. Otherwise it’d be like trees falling in the forest. Is a sound made?”

I’ve never heard it, Morty thought.

People continued to come into the square. Morty imagined them to be, like the men already there before he had asked his question, fellow connoisseurs.

Suddenly, and apparently at no signal, a man sprang up from a bench. He was already talking by the time he gained his feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man was saying, “in the City of New York last year two hundred forty-three people were burned to death in fires. Now, that does not take in Westchester County or Newark in New Jersey or the burned populations of Chicago or Montana or any other place on the face of this flammable globe. That’s the City of New York alone. Two hundred forty-three. How many of them husbands, fathers, kids, mothers, wives? And that’s death I’m talking about. How many singed children or limbs burned permanently useless?”

People moved up to him. Some were smiling.

“What’s the earth? How did it get here? The earth is the sun. The earth is a spinning fragment of the exploded sun. And I tell you that it is the natural function of the sun to burn. And I tell you that just as the acorn does not fall far from the tree, so too will the earth ever combust from here to eternity.

“Do not be deceived, my friends, by the notion of a ‘cooling earth.’ That’s nothing but the cant phrase of sophist scientists—”

“You tell ’em, Smoky Joe,” a man called good-naturedly from the crowd.

The speaker ignored him.

“… the cant phrase of sophist scientists . Don’t be lulled by it. As the one million people destroyed on the slopes of Etna were lulled. As the thousands charred beneath Vesuvius were lulled.”

“Smoky Joe thinks the Empire State Building will erupt one day,” a man shouted.

“Or as the natives of Chicago were lulled. Or Hiroshima. Or any of a hundred other places I could name.” He turned to the heckler. “Wise guy. It will. One day it will. What do you think? Do you know what the combined total of fire-insurance premiums is on the Empire State Building each year? One million…”

“…six hundred and ninety thousand,” the crowd joined him, familiar with the figure, “four hundred seventy-two dollars…”

“…fourteen cents,” the speaker said, finishing just behind the crowd.

“Let him speak,” Morty shouted.

“Thank you, sir,” the speaker said, “but they don’t bother me. Those bums don’t bother me. All right. What do you think? Those guys know what they’re doing they shell out like that. Everything burns. Where are your houses of yesteryear? Where are they? Gone. Burned down. What are your majestic ruins of Rome and Athens? Burned buildings! I’ve inspected them. I’ve been there and inspected them and they make me sick.

“The kindling point of human flesh is fifty-five degrees lower than the kindling point of a varnished hardwood floor, did you know that?”

“We know it, Smoky Joe,” said a man through cupped hands. “You told us last week.” Others near him grinned and clapped him on the back.

“What are we thinking about, friends? What are we thinking about to let this holocaust continue? And it will continue. Mark my words. It will continue. What’s the answer? ” Smoky Joe made himself taller as he challenged them. He grinned.

“It’s not a case of fighting fire with fire, let me tell you,” he said, and Morty, sick, knew it was a joke he had made a hundred times before. The speaker stooped for a moment and drew something out of a large cardboard file near his feet. Standing, he held out a mat on which had been mounted half a dozen box-camera photographs. They appeared to be views of a rather strange-looking house. He thumped the photographs with a thick finger. “The Fire Commissioner knows the answer. The Real Estate Board knows the answer. The construction interests know the answer,” he said, building to a climax. “And Smoky Joe has lived in the answer…”

“… twenty-four years ,” the crowd yelled, anticipating him.

“… — four years,” Smoky Joe echoed. “And what is the answer? It’s processed tin. Processed-tin walls. Processed-tin floors. Processed-tin doors and ceilings. Simple? Yes. Fallible? Yes. I’m very frank. It’ll burn. Everything will. But — after you’ve all been charred, marred and scarred in those Japanesey parchment-and-paper-dolls’ houses you call homes, the chances are a million to one that old Smoky Joe will be sitting back, high, dry and cool in his processed-tin strongbox!” He pounded his photographs again.