Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Eighty dollars rent. The roof over his head equaled two Ronnie Cook’s and His Friends. Five thousand words for rent.

Buddy was in the hands of Flacker. Flacker could torture him for six pages. Then you could have Dusty Blades speeding to the rescue with Sam, by boat, and the boat could spring a leak because the driver was in Flacker’s pay, and there could be a fight for the next six pages. The driver could have a gun. You could use it, but it wouldn’t be liked, because you’d done at least four like it already.

Furniture, and a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. His mother had always wanted a good dining-room table. She didn’t have a maid, she said, so he ought to get her a dining-room table. How many words for a dining-room table?

“Come on, Baby, make it two,” the second baseman out on the field was yelling. “Double ’em up!”

Andrew felt like picking up his old glove and going out there and joining them. When he was still in college he used to go out on a Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning and shag flies and jump around the infield and run and run all day, playing in pickup games until it got too dark to see. He was always tired now and even when he played tennis he didn’t move his feet right, because he was tired, and hit flat-footed and wild.

Spain, one hundred dollars. Oh, Lord.

A hundred and fifty to his father, to meet his father’s payroll. His father had nine people on his payroll, making little tin gadgets that his father tried to sell to the dime stores, and at the end of every month Andrew had to meet the payroll. His father always gravely made out a note to him.

Flacker is about to kill Buddy out of anger and desperation. In bursts Dusty, alone. Sam is hurt. On the way to the hospital. Buddy is spirited away a moment before Dusty arrives. Flacker, very smooth and oily. Confrontation. “Where is Buddy, Flacker?” “You mean the little lad?” “I mean the little lad, Flacker!”

Fifty dollars to Dorothy’s piano teacher. His sister. Another plain girl. She might as well learn how to play the piano. Then one day they’d come to him and say, “Dorothy is ready for her debut. All we’re asking you to do is rent Town Hall for a Wednesday evening. Just advance the money.” She’d never get married. She was too smart for the men who would want her and too plain for the men she’d want herself. She bought her dresses in Saks. He would have to support, for life, a sister who would only buy her dresses in Saks and pay her piano teacher fifty dollars a month every month. She was only twenty-four, she would have a normal life expectancy of at least forty years, twelve times forty, plus dresses at Saks and Town Hall from time to time …

His father’s teeth—ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age.

The automobile. Nine hundred dollars. A nine-hundred-dollar check looked very austere and impressive, like a penal institution. He was going to go off in the automobile, find a place in the mountains, write a play. Only he could never get himself far enough ahead on Dusty Blades and Ronnie Cook and His Friends. Twenty thousand words a week, each week, recurring like Sunday on the calendar. How many words was Hamlet? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

Twenty-three dollars to Best’s. That was Martha’s sweater for her birthday. “Either you say yes or no,” Martha said Saturday night. “I want to get married and I’ve waited long enough.” If you married you paid rent in two places, light, gas, telephone twice, and you bought stockings, dresses, toothpaste, medical attention, for your wife.

Flacker plays with something in his pocket. Dusty’s hand shoots out, grabs his wrist, pulls his hand out. Buddy’s little penknife, which Dusty had given him for a birthday present, is in Flacker’s hand. “Flacker, tell me where Buddy Jones is, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” A gong rings. Flacker has stepped on an alarm. Doors open and the room fills with his henchmen.

Twenty dollars to Macy’s for books. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought . How does Dusty Blades fit into the Main Currents of American Thought?

Ten dollars to Dr. Farber. “I don’t sleep at night. Can you help me?”

“Do you drink coffee?”

“I drink one cup of coffee in the morning. That’s all.”

Pills, to be taken before retiring. Ten dollars. We ransom our lives from doctors’ hands.

If you marry, you take an apartment downtown because it’s silly to live in Brooklyn this way; and you buy furniture, four rooms full of furniture, beds, chairs, dishrags, relatives. Martha’s family was poor and getting no younger and finally there would be three families, with rent and clothes and doctors and funerals.

Andrew got up and opened the closet door. In it, stacked in files, were the scripts he had written in the last four years. They stretched from one end of a wide closet across to another, bridge from one wall to another of a million words. Four years’ work.

Next script. The henchmen close in on Dusty. He hears the sounds of Buddy screaming in the next room …

How many years more?

The vacuum cleaner roared.

Martha was Jewish. That meant you’d have to lie your way into some hotels, if you went at all, and you never could escape from one particular meanness of the world around you; and when the bad time came there you’d be, adrift on that dangerous sea.

He sat down at his desk. One hundred dollars again to Spain. Barcelona had fallen and the long dusty lines were beating their way to the French border with the planes over them, and out of a sense of guilt at not being on a dusty road, yourself, bloody-footed and in fear of death, you gave a hundred dollars, feeling at the same time that it was too much and nothing you ever gave could be enough. Three-and-a-third The Adventures of Dusty Blades to the dead and dying of Spain.

The world loads you day by day with new burdens that increase on your shoulders. Lift a pound and you find you’re carrying a ton. “Marry me,” she says, “marry me.” Then what does Dusty do? What the hell can he do that he hasn’t done before? For five afternoons a week now, for a year, Dusty has been in Flacker’s hands, or the hands of somebody else who is Flacker but has another name, and each time he has escaped. How now?

The vacuum roared in the hallway outside his room.

“Mom!” he yelled. “Please turn that thing off!”

“What did you say?” his mother called.

“Nothing.”

He added up the bank balances. His figures showed that he was four hundred and twelve dollars overdrawn instead of one hundred and eleven dollars, as the bank said. He didn’t feel like adding the figures over. He put the vouchers and the bank’s sheet into an envelope for his income-tax returns.

“Hit it out, Charlie!” a boy called on the field. “Make it a fast one!”

Andrew felt like going out and playing with them. He changed his clothes and put on a pair of old spikes that were lying in the back of the closet. His old pants were tight on him. Fat. If he ever let go, if anything happened and he couldn’t exercise, he’d blow up like a house, if he got sick and had to lie in bed and convalesce … Maybe Dusty has a knife in a holster up his sleeve … How to plant that? The rent, the food, the piano teacher, the people at Saks who sold his sister dresses, the nimble girls who painted the tin gadgets in his father’s shop, the teeth in his father’s mouth, the doctors, the doctors, all living on the words that would have to come out of his head. See here, Flacker, I know what you’re up to. Business: Sound of a shot. A groan. Hurry, before the train gets to the crossing! Look! He’s gaining on us! Hurry! will he make it? Will Dusty Blades head off the desperate gang of counterfeiters and murderers in the race for the yacht? Will I be able to keep it up? The years, the years ahead … You grow fat and the lines become permanent under your eyes and you drink too much and you pay more to the doctors because death is nearer and there is no stop, no vacation from life, in no year can you say, “I want to sit this one out, kindly excuse me.”