Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

They passed several restaurants alongside the road. Steve was hungry, but he didn’t suggest stopping. This was Crane’s expedition and Steve had no intention of interfering with whatever ritual Crane was following.

They rocked along between groves of lemon and orange and the air was heavy with the perfume of the fruit, mingled with the smell of salt from the sea.

They went through the flecked shade of avenues of eucalyptus that the Spanish monks had planted in another century to make their journeys from mission to mission bearable in the California summers. Rattling along in the noisy car, squinting a little when the car spurted out into bare sunlight, Steve thought of what the road must have looked like with an old man in a cassock nodding along it on a sleepy mule, to the sound of distant Spanish bells, welcoming travelers. There were no bells ringing today. California, Steve thought, sniffing the diesel oil of a truck in front of them, has not improved.

The car swerved around a turn, Crane put on the brakes and they stopped. Then Steve saw what they had stopped for.

There was a huge tree leaning over a bend of the highway and all the bark at road level on one side of the tree had been ripped off. The wood beneath, whitish, splintered, showed in a raw wound.

“This is the place,” Crane said, in his harsh whisper. He stopped the engine and got out of the car. Steve followed him and stood to one side as Crane peered nearsightedly through his glasses at the tree. Crane touched the tree, just at the edge of the wound.

“Eucalyptus,” he said. “From the Greek, meaning well covered; the flower, before it opens having a sort of cap. A genus of plants of the N. O. Myrtaceae. If I had been a true brother,” he said, “I would have come here Saturday morning and cut this tree down. My brother would be alive today.” He ran his hand casually over the torn and splintered wood, and Steve remembered how he had touched the blackboard and flicked chalk dust off the ends of words that morning, unemphatically, in contrast with the feel of things, the slate, the chalk mark at the end of the last “s” in Adonais, the gummy, drying wood. “You’d think,” Crane said, “that if you loved a brother enough you’d have sense enough to come and cut a tree down, wouldn’t you? The Egyptians, I read somewhere,” he said, “were believed to have used the oil of the eucalyptus leaf in the embalming process.” His long hand flicked once more at the torn bark. “Well, I didn’t cut the tree down. Let’s go.”

He strode back to the car, without looking back at the tree. He got into the car behind the wheel and sat slumped there, squinting through his glasses at the road ahead of him, waiting for Steve to settle himself beside him. “It’s terrible for my mother and father,” Crane said, after Steve had closed the door behind him. A truck filled with oranges passed them in a thunderous whoosh and a swirl of dust, leaving a fragrance of a hundred weddings on the air. “We live at home, you know. My brother and I were the only children they had, and they look at me and they can’t help feeling, If it had to be one of them, why couldn’t it have been him? and it shows in their eyes and they know it shows in their eyes and they know I agree with them and they feel guilty and I can’t help them.” He started the engine with a succession of nervous, uncertain gestures, like a man who was just learning how to drive. He turned the car around in the direction of Los Angeles and they started south. Steve looked once more at the tree, but Crane kept his eyes on the road ahead of him.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “I know a place where we can get abalone about ten miles from here.”

They were sitting in the weather-beaten shack with the windows open on the ocean, eating their abalone and drinking beer. The jukebox was playing Downtown . It was the third time they were listening to Downtown . Crane kept putting dimes into the machine and choosing the same song over and over again.

“I’m crazy about that song,” he said. “Saturday night in America. Budweiser Bacchanalia.”

“Everything all right, boys?” The waitress, a fat little dyed blonde of about thirty, smiled down at them from the end of the table.

“Everything is perfectly splendid,” Crane said in a clear, ringing voice.

The waitress giggled. “Why, that sure is nice to hear,” she said.

Crane examined her closely. “What do you do when it storms?” he asked.

“What’s that?” She frowned uncertainly at him.

“When it storms,” Crane said. “When the winds blow. When the sea heaves. Then the young sailors drown in the bottomless deeps.”

“My,” the waitress said, “and I thought you boys only had one beer.”

“I advise anchors,” Crane said. “You are badly placed. A turn of the wind, a twist of the tide, and you will be afloat, past the reef, on the way to Japan.”

“I’ll tell the boss,” the waitress said, grinning. “You advise anchors.”

“You are in peril, lady,” Crane said seriously. “Don’t think you’re not. Nobody speaks candidly. Nobody tells you the one-hundred-percent honest-to-God truth.” He pushed a dime from a pile at his elbow, across the table to the waitress. “Would you be good enough to put this in the box, my dear?” he said formally.

“What do you want to hear?” the waitress asked.

“ Downtown ,” Crane said.

“Again?” The waitress grimaced. “It’s coming out of my ears.”

“I understand it’s all the rage,” Crane said.

The waitress took the dime and put it in the box and Downtown started over again.

“She’ll remember me,” Crane said, eating fried potatoes covered with ketchup. “Everytime it blows and the sea comes up. You must not go through life unremembered.”

“You’re a queer duck, all right,” Steve said, smiling a little, to take the sting out of it, but surprised into saying it.

“Ah, I’m not so queer,” Crane said, wiping ketchup off his chin. “I don’t behave like this ordinarily. This is the first time I ever flirted with a waitress in my life.”

Steve laughed. “Do you call that flirting?”

“Isn’t it?” Crane looked annoyed. “What the hell is it if it isn’t flirting?” He surveyed Steve appraisingly. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you screw that girl I always see you with around the campus?”

Steve put down his fork. “Now, wait a minute,” he said.

“I don’t like the way she walks,” Crane said. “She walks like a coquette. I prefer whores.”

“Let’s leave it at that,” Steve said.

“Ah, Christ,” Crane said, “I thought you wanted to be my friend. You did a friendly, sensitive thing this morning. In the California desert, in the Los Angeles Gobi, in the Camargue of Culture. You put out a hand. You offered the cup.”

“I want to be your friend, all right,” Steve said, “but there’re limits …”

“The word friend has no limits,” Crane said harshly. He poured some of his beer over the fried potatoes, already covered with ketchup. He forked a potato, put it in his mouth, chewed judiciously. “I’ve invented a taste thrill,” he said. “Let me tell you something, Dennicott, friendship is limitless communication. Ask me anything and I’ll answer. The more fundamental the matter, the fuller the answer. What’s your idea of friendship? The truth about trivia—and silence and hypocrisy about everything else? God, you could have used a dose of my brother.” He poured some more beer over the gobs of ketchup on the fried potatoes. “You want to know why I can say Keats and name my brother in the same breath?” he asked challengingly, hunched over the table. “I’ll tell you why. Because he had a sense of elation and a sense of purity.” Crane squinted thoughtfully at Steve. “You, too,” he said, “that’s why I said you would be the one to ask, out of the whole class. You have it, too—the sense of elation. I could tell—listening to you laugh, watching you walk down the library steps holding your girl’s elbow. I, too,” he said gravely, “am capable of elation. But I reserve it for other things.” He made a mysterious inward grimace. “But the purity—” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t know yourself. The jury is still out on you. But I knew about my brother. You want to know what I mean by purity?” He was talking compulsively. Silence would have made memory unbearable. “It’s having a private set of standards and never compromising them,” he said. “Even when it hurts, even when nobody else knows, even when it’s just a tiny, formal gesture, that ninety-nine out of a hundred people would make without thinking about it.”