Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“Cool you’ll be,” a man said,“—in winter .”

“I already said it’s not infallible. But suppose there is a fire. Now, it can’t start in those processed-tin floors, walls, ceilings or doors, but let’s suppose for the sake of argument that you’ve gone to bed and your wife is still up reading in the living room and she’s smoking a cigarette, and she gets sleepy and her burning cigarette falls on her housecoat and starts a fire. Well, you’re sound asleep, but you smell the smoke and you get up to see what’s what, and you see all the furniture in the living room is burning. That could happen. Well, what do you do? All you do is go back into your bedroom and slam the processed-tin door and forget about it! ”

“What about your wife, Smoky?”

“My wife is dead in a fire. Don’t make jokes about my wife.”

“Oh no,” Morty said softly. “Oh no.”

“He always uses the same example,” a man explained. “He always uses the same example, and that guy always asks the same question.”

Morty shouldered his way out of the crowd, seeing, suddenly projected on the grass, his shadow, the knapsack making a kind of hump on his back.

While he had been listening to the man who believed in fire, other groups had formed.

A dozen voices competed against each other, and Morty moved along the curving cement walks behind the backs of the crowds. It was like a holiday. Small children climbed over benches or darted in and out of groups, like dwarfs with messages.

In the crowds, constricted, clumsy under his knapsack, he brushed against the shoulders of other men and felt a queer, muffled shock, as though someone had stepped on an artificial leg he used, or struck him in a glass eye. He shoved against people — collecting randomly now, drawn to the speakers by some curious abeyance of the will, as men pause before one booth rather than another at a fair. He stepped over a low iron railing onto a soft noman’s-land of grass. A policeman waved him away. He moved back into the voices.

He stopped to listen to a man with a beard, and it struck him that the man appeared not so much to address those men already listening to him as the others — those passing by in low-geared, imposed shuffle, or already settled in small, thickish bands around other speakers. He did not speak or persuade so much as call his oration, the ideas strangely shouted in an unthinking excitement, like someone with another’s umbrella rushing to a doorway to call after the guest who has left it behind.

“People waste time,” the man shouted. “They’re fools. It’s simple. I never ask questions. Notice that. No one’s ever heard me ask a question. The most perfidious instrument in all human language is the question.

“Look at your great teachers. ‘Verily I say unto you,’ Christ says. The Ten Commandments are not questions. Not one sentence in the Declaration of Independence is a question. No valuable literature or great human or divine instrument is ever interrogative. Sermons! Declarations! Commandments! Marvelous!

“There is no room or time in life for questions. Questions are the breeding ground of dissension, atheistic pestilence and war. I tell you that when I hear men talking together and one man asks another a question, I want to go up and shake that man!

“Look at your tragic secular literature: Faust is punished for asking questions. Oedipus is. Hell is a questioner’s answer. Nature’s sinuous and hideous serpent forms a question mark as he writhes along the ground. So did he in Paradise! So does he in Hades!

“Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies, the poet says. No one has ever heard me ask questions.”

“What do you do when you’re lost?” a man asked.

“Who gets lost?” the bearded man roared.

Morty pulled away, turning carefully, conscious again of the heavy pack, feeling clumsy.

“When do you speak?” a boy said, coming up to him. He was young, vaguely tough. “I been here a hundred times. I never heard you speak.”

He pushed past the boy.

Five men stood casually before a lamppost. One, jacketless, his bare arms slackly ribbed with long, stretched veins, addressed the others in a husky, conversational tone. Morty could not be sure whether he was a speaker or someone who had come there to chat with the others.

“Forty years I had a store in The Bronx,” he said, “and I tell you the important thing is the right mark-up.”

Another interrupted him. “That’s all very well. Of course, mark-up is important—”

“The right mark-up, I said.”

“All right, the right mark-up, but more important is knowing how much of an item to stock.”

“No, no,” a third said, “it’s the timing, knowing when to sell what. You got to understand the needs of the neighborhood.”

“Display. Display is everything,” a fourth joined in. “In the proper package you could sell a rat on a stick.”

“I don’t know,” the last man said. “I think good will. Good will is very important.”

Morty left them and went toward a tall, gray-haired woman a few yards away.

“The salvation of the world,” she said calmly, “can only lie in the successful efforts of our organization to bring to bear as a practical, major influence in all the underdeveloped nations, as well as in all the presently constituted world powers, free and iron curtain, the noble principles of the universal Republican party!”

When he turned away he saw the boy who had asked when he would speak. A friend was with him, and the two of them pointed to Perlmutter. The boy who had spoken nudged his friend expectantly.

Morty went toward the largest group he had yet seen, the people standing in a sort of deep, shapeless huddle. They shifted from foot to foot like people dancing in place and craned their necks back and forth nervously, endlessly, evidently trying to obtain some momentary view of the speaker hidden amongst them. They reminded Morty of the pigeons he had seen the old lady feeding in the park. Maybe this time, he thought, and moved closer. From where he stood, still at the perimeter of the crowd, he couldn’t hear the speaker. He would have moved away, but just then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the two boys were still following him. To get away from them he pushed harshly against the people straining to get a look at the speaker. When they saw he wore a knapsack they dropped back, intimidated and docile, and then closed around him again as though pouring in to fill up an imaginary wake.

Now he was surrounded, and apparently no closer to the speaker he still could not hear. He lunged forward, the canvas hump climbing unsmoothly on his back, and pushed through the final ring of people. There, in the center of the crowd, was a tiny man, shirtless, bald, explaining, in a thin, wavering voice pitched like a whisper, the tattoos that completely covered his torso and arms and hands and face and skull. It was as if he had been impossibly wrapped in a tight, shiny oriental rug. He raised his left arm and pointed with a tattooed finger to tattooed hair etched into his shaved armpit.

Morty stumbled past him without looking and, arms extended, reached into the crowd behind the man, jabbing at them stiffly to make them move.

When he emerged, the boys were waiting for him. Now there were four of them.

One came forward as if to speak to him, and another reached out to touch the pack on his back. Morty jerked violently away. Somewhere he had lost his stick. He only realized it now that he meant to strike them with it. They continued to trail him in a sort of sneering casualness, and he turned on them.

“I am not defenseless,” he said. “Stop following me.”