William Kennedy - Ironweed

“He didn’t look any different than when I married him.”

“No kiddin’,” Francis said.

“Outside of his hair was snow-white, that’s all.”

“Her kids were there,” Jack said.

“The snots,” Clara said.

“Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead,” Francis said. “Helen’d probably go crazy.”

“Why if you dropped dead she’d bury you before you started stinkin’, “ Jack said. “That’s all’d happen.”

“What a heart you have,” Francis said.

“You gotta bury your dead,” Jack said.

“That’s a rule of the Catholic church,” said Helen.

“I’m not talkin’ about the Catholic church,” Francis said.

“Anyway, now she’s a single girl,” Jack said, “I’m gonna find out what Clara’s gonna do.”

“I’m gonna go right on livin’ normal,” Clara said.

“Normal is somethin’,” Francis said. “What the hell is normal anyway, is what I’d like to know. Normal is cold. Goddamn it’s cold tonight. My fingers. I rubbed myself to see if I was livin’. You know, I wanna ask you one question.”

“No,” Clara said.

“You said no. Whataya mean no?”

“What’s he gonna ask?” Jack said. “Find out what he’s gonna ask.”

Clara waited.

“How’s everythin’ been goin’?” Francis asked.

o o o

Clara lifted the bottle of white fluid from the phonograph table, where the Kate Smith record was scratching in its final groove, and drank. She shook her head as it went down, and the greasy, uncombed stringlets of her hair leaped like whips. Her eyes hung low in their sockets, a pair of collapsing moons. She recapped the bottle and then swigged her muscatel to drive out the taste. She dragged on her cigarette, then coughed and spat venomously into a wadded handkerchief she held in her fist.

“Things ain’t been goin’ too good for Clara,” Jack said, turning off the phonograph.

“I’m still trottin’,” Clara said.

“Well you look pretty good for a sick lady,” Francis said. “Look as good as usual to me.”

Clara smiled over the rim of her wineglass at Francis.

“Nobody,” said Helen, “asked how things are going for me, but I’ll tell you. They’re going just wonderful. Just wonderful.”

“She’s drunker than hell,” Francis said.

“Oh I’m loaded to the gills,” Helen said, giggling. “I can hardly walk.”

“You ain’t drunk even a nickel’s worth,” Jack said. “Franny’s the drunk one. You’re hopeless, right. Franny?”

“Helen’ll never amount to nothin’ if she stays with me,” Francis said.

“I always thought you were an intelligent man,” Jack said, and he swallowed half his wine, “but you can’t be, you can’t be.”

“You could be mistaken,” Helen said.

“Keep out of it,” Francis told her, and he hooked a thumb at her, facing Jack. “There’s enough right there to put you in the loony bin, just worryin’ about where she’s gonna live, where she’s gonna stay.”

“I think you could be a charmin’ man,” Jack said, “if you’d only get straight. You could have twenty dollars in your pocket at all times, make fifty, seventy-five a week, have a beautiful apartment with everything you want in it, all you want to drink, once you get straight.”

“I worked today up at the cemetery,” Francis said.

“Steady work?” asked Jack.

“Just today. Tomorrow I gotta see a fella needs some liftin’ done. The old back’s still tough enough.”

“You keep workin’ you’ll have fifty in your pocket.”

“I had fifty, I’d spend it on her,” Francis said. “Or buy a pair of shoes. Other pair wore out and Harry over at the old clothes joint give ‘em to me for a quarter. He seen me half barefoot and says, Francis you can’t go around like that, and he give me these. But they don’t fit right and I only got one of ‘ em laced. Twine there in the other one. I got a shoestring in my pocket but ain’t put it in yet.”

“You mean you got the shoelace and you didn’t put it in the shoe?” Clara asked.

“I got it in my pocket,” Francis said.

“Then put it in the shoe.”

“I think it’s in this pocket here. You know where it is, Helen?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Look and see,” Clara said.

“She wants me to put a shoestring in my shoe,” Francis said.

“Right,” said Clara.

Francis stopped fumbling in his pocket and let his hands fall away.

“I’m renegin’,” he said.

“You’re what?” Clara asked.

“I’m renegin’ and I don’t like to do that.”

o o o

Francis put down his wine, walked to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet, cover down, trying to understand why he’d lied about a shoestring. He smelled the odor that came up from his fetid crotch and stood up then and dropped his trousers. He stepped out of them, then pulled off his shorts and threw them in the sink. He lifted the toilet cover and sat on the seat, and with Jack’s soap and handfuls of water from the bowl, he washed his genitals and buttocks, and all their encrusted orifices, crevices, and secret folds. He rinsed himself, relathered, and rinsed again. He dried himself with one of Jack’s towels, picked his shorts out of the sink, and mopped the floor with them where he had splashed water. Then he filled the sink with hot water and soaked the shorts. He soaped them and they separated into two pieces in his hands. He let the water out of the sink, wrung the shorts, and put them in his coat pocket. He opened the door a crack and called out: “Hey, Jack,” and when Jack came, Francis hid his nakedness with a towel.

“Jack, old buddy, you got an old pair of shorts? Any old pair. Mine just ripped all to hell.”

“I’ll go look.”

“Could I borry the use of your razor?”

“Help yourself.”

Jack came back with the shorts and Francis put them on. Then, as Francis soaped his beard, Aldo Campione and Rowdy Dick Doolan entered the bathroom. Rowdy Dick, dapper in a three-piece blue-serge suit and a pearlgray cap, sat on the toilet, cover down. Aldo made himself comfortable on the rim of the tub, his gardenia unintimidated by the chill of the evening. Jack’s razor wouldn’t cut Francis’s three-day beard, and so he rinsed off the lather, soaked his face again in hot water, and relatheied. While Francis rubbed the soap deeply into his beard, Rowdy Dick studied him but could remember nothing of Francis’s face. This was to be expected, for when last seen, it was night in Chicago, under a bridge not far from the railyards, and five men were sharing the wealth in 1930, a lean year. On the wall of the abutment above the five, as one of them had pointed out, a former resident of the space had inscribed a poem:

Poor little lamb,

He wakes up in the morning,

His fleece all cold.

He knows what’s coming.

Say, little lamb,

We’ll go on the bummer this summer.

We’ll sit in the shade

And drink lemonade,

The world’ll be on the hummer.

Rowdy Dick remembered this poem as well as he remembered the laughter of his sister, Mary, who was striped dead, sleigh riding, under the rails of a horsedrawn sleigh; as clearly as he remembered the plaintive, dying frown of his brother, Ted, who perished from a congenital hole in the heart. They had been three until then, living with an uncle because their parents had died, one by one, and left them alone. And then there was Dick, truly alone, who grew up tough, worked the docks, and then found an easier home in the Tenderloin, breaking the faces of nasty drunks, oily pickpockets, and fat tittypinchers. But that didn’t last either. Nothing lasted for Rowdy Dick, and he went on the bum and wound up under the bridge with Francis Phelan and three other now-faceless men. What he did remember of Francis was his hand, which now held a razor that stroked the soapy cheek.