Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

When he started on Lueger’s eye, Charley talked. “You bastard. Oh, you lousy goddamn bastard,” came out with the sobs and the tears as he hit at the eye with his right hand, cutting it, smashing it, tearing it again and again, his hand coming away splattered with blood each time. “Oh, you dumb, mean, skirt-chasing sonofabitch, bastard.” And he kept hitting with fury and deliberation at the shattered eye.…

A car came up Twelfth Street from the waterfront and slowed down at the corner. Stryker jumped on the running board. “Keep moving,” he said, very tough, “if you know what’s good for you.”

He jumped off the running board and watched the car speed away.

Charley, still sobbing, pounded Lueger in the chest and belly. With each blow Lueger slammed against the iron fence with a noise like a carpet being beaten, until his coat ripped off the pike and he slid to the sidewalk.

Charley stood back, his fists swaying, the tears still coming, the sweat running down his face inside his collar, his clothes stained with blood.

“O.K.,” he said, “O.K., you bastard.”

He walked swiftly up under the L in the shadows, and Stryker hurried after him.

Much later, in the hospital, Preminger stood over the bed in which Lueger lay, unconscious, in splints and bandages.

“Yes,” he said to the detective and the doctor. “That’s our man. Lueger. A steward. The papers on him are correct.”

“Who do you think done it?” the detective asked in a routine voice. “Did he have any enemies?”

“Not that I know of,” Preminger said. “He was a very popular boy. Especially with the ladies.”

The detective started out of the ward. “Well,” he said, “he won’t be a very popular boy when he gets out of here.”

Preminger shook his head. “You must be very careful in a strange city,” he said to the interne, and went back to the ship.

E ddie Barnes looked at the huge Adirondack hills, browning in the strong summer afternoon sun. He listened to his brother Lawrence practice finger-exercises on the piano inside the house, onetwothreefour five , onetwothreefour five , and longed for New York. He lay on his stomach in the long grass of the front lawn and delicately peeled his sunburned nose. Morosely he regarded a grasshopper, stupid with sun, wavering on a bleached blade of grass in front of his nose. Without interest he put out his hand and captured it.

“Give honey,” he said, listlessly. “Give honey or I’ll kill yuh …”

But the grasshopper crouched unmoving, unresponsive, oblivious to Life or Death.

Disgusted, Eddie tossed the grasshopper away. It flew uncertainly, wheeled, darted back to its blade of grass, alighted and hung there dreamily, shaking a little in the breeze in front of Eddie’s nose. Eddie turned over on his back and looked at the high blue sky.

The country! Why anybody ever went to the country … What things must be doing in New York now, what rash, beautiful deeds on the steaming, rich streets, what expeditions, what joy, what daring sweaty adventure among the trucks, the trolley cars, the baby carriages! What cries, hoarse and humorous, what light laughter outside the red-painted shop where lemon ice was sold at three cents the double scoop, true nourishment for a man at fifteen.

Eddie looked around him, at the silent, eternal, granite-streaked hills. Trees and birds, that’s all. He sighed, torn with thoughts of distant pleasure, stood up, went over to the window behind which Lawrence seriously hammered at the piano, onetwothreefour five .

“Lawrrrence,” Eddie called, the rrr’s rolling with horrible gentility in his nose, “Lawrrrence, you stink.”

Lawrence didn’t even look up. His thirteen-year-old fingers, still pudgy and babyish, went onetwothreefour five , with unswerving precision. He was talented and he was dedicated to his talent and some day they would wheel a huge piano out onto the stage of Carnegie Hall and he would come out and bow politely to the thunder of applause and sit down, flipping his coat-tails back, and play, and men and women would laugh and cry and remember their first loves as they listened to him. So now his fingers went up and down, up and down, taking strength against the great day.

Eddie looked through the window a moment more, watching his brother, sighed and walked around to the side of the house, where a crow was sleepily eating the radish seeds that Eddie had planted three days ago in a fit of boredom. Eddie threw a stone at the crow and the crow silently flew up to the branch of an oak and waited for Eddie to go away. Eddie threw another stone at the crow. The crow moved to another branch. Eddie wound up and threw a curve, but the crow disdained it. Eddie picked his foot up the way he’d seen Carl Hubbell do and sizzled one across not more than three feet from the crow. Without nervousness the crow walked six inches up the branch. In the style now of Dizzy Dean, with terrifying speed, Eddie delivered his fast one. It was wild and the crow didn’t even cock his head. You had to expect to be a little wild with such speed. Eddie found a good round stone and rubbed it professionally on his back pocket. He looked over his shoulder to hold the runner close to the bag, watched for the signal. Eddie Hubbell Dean Mungo Feller Ferrell Warnecke Gomez Barnes picked up his foot and let go his high hard one. The crow slowly got off his branch and regretfully sailed away.

Eddie went over, kicked away the loose dirt, and looked at his radish seeds. Nothing was happening to them. They just lay there, baked and inactive, just as he had placed them. No green, no roots, no radishes, no anything. He was sorry he’d ever gone in for farming. The package of seeds had cost him a dime, and the only thing that happened to them was that they were eaten by crows. And now he could use that dime. Tonight he had a date.

“I got a date,” he said aloud, savoring the words. He went to the shade of the grape arbor to think about it. He sat down on the bench under the cool flat leaves, and thought about it. He’d never had a date before in his life. He had thirty-five cents. Thirty-five cents ought to be enough for any girl, but if he hadn’t bought the radish seeds, he’d have had forty-five cents, really prepared for any eventuality. “Damn crow,” he said, thinking of the evil black head feeding on his dime.

Many times he’d wondered how you managed to get a date. Now he knew. It happened all of a sudden. You went up to a girl where she was lying on the raft in a lake and you looked at her, chubby in a blue bathing suit, and she looked seriously at you out of serious blue eyes where you stood dripping with lake water, with no hair on your chest, and suddenly you said, “I don’t s’pose yuh’re not doing anything t’morra night, are yuh?” You didn’t know quite what you meant, but she did, and she said, “Why, no, Eddie. Say about eight o’clock?” And you nodded and dived back into the lake and there you were.

Still, those radish seeds, that crow-food, that extra dime.…

Lawrence came out, flexing his fingers, very neat in clean khaki shorts and a white blouse. He sat down next to Eddie in the grape arbor.

“I would like a strawberry ice cream soda,” he said.

“Got any money?” Eddie asked, hopefully.

Lawrence shook his head.

“No strawberry ice cream soda,” Eddie said.

Lawrence nodded seriously. “You got any money?” he asked.

“Some,” Eddie said carefully. He pulled down a grape leaf and cracked it between his hands, held up the two parts and looked at them critically.