Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Billy Elk stood in front of O’Malley and smiled, his face suddenly broken by the flash of teeth and gleam of eye into warm childishness. “See,” he said. “I’m not such a bad guy.”

He waved and departed into the park, slipping silently and expertly among the trees, like Tecumseh’s braves and the slippery, valiant red defenders of Kentucky’s bloody ground.

O’Malley walked slowly home, breathing deeply the clear morning air, pleased to be in a city in which Indians roamed the streets and went to great lengths to prove their friendliness and goodness of heart.

L ester Barnum walked down the steps, across the street and around the corner without looking back. He was a small, worn-out, neat, married-looking man, walking slowly, as though he never got enough sleep, his head lowered politely and humbly into his gray overcoat, his gray face pursed vaguely and undramatically over some inner problem.

A year in jail, he thought. He shook his head and turned to look at the huge gray prison that had held him, but he had gone around the corner without realizing it, and the jail and the year were behind him and out of sight. He walked aimlessly on, looking without real interest at the free men about him.

He hadn’t liked the men he’d met in prison. In the movies, cellblocks were invariably inhabited by warm, great-hearted, harmless persons, but in the year he had spent behind bars no convicts of that particular type had turned up. There had only been rough, large, desperate men who had put pepper in his coffee, nails in his bed, and occasionally, in moments of extreme emotion, had hit him with mop-handles and slop buckets. And there was always a small, pasty-faced man turning up every month or so, whispering gratingly into his ear in the exercise yard, “Talk an’ the next stop is Woodlawn. Fer yer own good …”

Everybody took it for granted that he owned some secret, deadly information—the police, the district attorney, the convicts. Barnum sighed as he walked listlessly along the bustling, free streets. He stopped irresolutely at a corner. No direction was more inviting than any other direction, no street offered any final destination. There was no home for him to go to. For the first time in his forty-three years there was no definite, appointed place where his clothes were hanging, his bed ready to be slept in. His wife had gone to St. Louis with an automobile mechanic and had taken his two daughters with her. “I might as well tell you,” she’d said flatly in the visiting room at the jail after he’d been there three months. “This has been going on a long time, but now he’s going to St. Louis and I guess it’s about time you found out.” And she’d pulled at one of the curly little hats she was always wearing and adjusted her corset a little angrily as though Barnum had insulted her and she’d started west. And he’d found out that the printing shop he’d worked in for seventeen years had been unionized and his job had been taken over, at a much higher salary, by a Rumanian with a beard.

Barnum whistled bleakly through his teeth, thinking vaguely of the years behind him when he had led an ordinary, simple existence, bringing home the comic papers to his children every evening, dozing after dinner while his wife complained of one thing and another, a plain, unnoticed, uncomplicated life, in which he never talked to such important, improbable persons as district attorneys and Irish detectives, never had pepper put in his coffee by exasperated swindlers and dope-peddlers.

It had all started because he’d turned down Columbus Avenue, instead of Broadway. A year ago he had been walking slowly and quietly home from work, worrying over the fact that the Boss had marched back and forth behind him in the shop all afternoon, muttering, “I can’t stand it! There are limits! I can’t stand it!” Barnum hadn’t known what it was that the Boss couldn’t stand, but, vaguely, it had worried him, as there was always the possibility that the thing that the Boss couldn’t stand might be Barnum. But he had been walking wearily home, knowing there would be haddock for dinner and that he would have to mind the children that evening because his wife was going to some woman’s club where, she said, instruction was to be had in knitting.

Dimly Barnum had felt the evening was not going to be pleasant—dull, aimless, like thousands of other evenings in his life.

Then it had happened. A tall, very dark man had walked swiftly past Barnum, holding his hands in his pockets. Suddenly another man, in a gray hat and topcoat, had leaped out of a doorway and tapped the tall dark man on the shoulder. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” the man in the gray hat had said loudly and the dark man had started to run and the man in the gray hat had pulled a gun from under his armpit and yelled, “Not this time, Spanish!” and shot the dark man four times. The dark man slid quietly to the pavement and the man in the gray coat said, “How do you like that?” and looked once, coldly, at Barnum, who was standing there, with his mouth open. “Aah!” the man in the gray coat said loudly, pulling up one corner of his mouth in a snarl—and then he’d disappeared.

Barnum just stood there looking at the tall dark man who was lying quietly on the sidewalk, looking not so tall now, with the blood coming from him. After a while Barnum closed his mouth. He moved dreamily over to the man lying on the sidewalk. The man’s eyes looked up at Barnum, calmly dead.

“Say—say, Mister! What happened?” A man in a butcher’s apron was standing next to Barnum, looking down excitedly.

“I saw it,” Barnum said slowly. “This fellow walked past me and a man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway and he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ and then he said, ‘Not this time, Spanish’ and he went bang! bang! bang! bang! and he said ‘How do you like that?’ and he looked at me and he went ‘Aaah!’ and he disappeared and this gentleman was dead.”

“What happened?” A fat lady ran across the street from a millinery shop, shouting as she ran.

“A man’s been shot,” the butcher said. “He saw it.” He pointed at Barnum.

“How did it happen?” the milliner asked, respectfully. Three more men had run up by this time, and four small boys, all looking at the corpse.

“Well,” Barnum said, feeling important as the babel of talk died down as he began to speak, “I was walking along and this fellow walked past me and a man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway and he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ and this fellow started to run and the man in the gray hat pulled out a gun and he said, ‘Not this time, Spanish’ and he went bang! bang! bang! bang!” Barnum shouted the bangs and pointed his finger violently at the corpse on the sidewalk. “And he said, ‘How do you like that?’ and he looked at me and he went ‘Aaah!’” Barnum curled his lip into an imitation of the murderer’s snarl. “And he disappeared and this gentleman was dead.”

By now there were fifty people gathered around Barnum and the corpse. “What happened?” the latest arrival asked.

“I was walking along,” Barnum said in a loud voice, conscious of every eye upon him, “and this fellow walked past me.…”

“Lissen, Buddy.” A small rough-looking man nudged his elbow. “Why don’t you go home? You didn’t see nuthin’.”

“I saw,” Barnum said excitedly. “I saw with my own eyes. A man in a gray hat jumped out of a doorway …” Barnum leaped to demonstrate, the crowd respectfully falling back to give him room, as Barnum landed catlike, his knees bent but tense. “And he said, ‘Here you are, you son of a bitch!’ And this fellow”—with a wave for the corpse—“started to run …” Barnum took two quick little steps to show how the dead man had started to run “… and the man in the gray hat pulled out a gun and said …”