Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“They’re like trusties, the shleppers ,” Izzy explained. “They’re like porters. They get here early in the morning and start loading up the soda in the different tanks all over the ballpark. Then later they cover ’em with ice on top. Shleppers , you know what I mean? Sometimes on doubleheaders, or World Series, even we gotta help shlepp . But those bastards, they get scorecards afterward. You know scorecards? With all the ballplayers’ names in them? They sell themselves. A nickel apiece, and they get hundreds of ’em right next to the gate where the fans come in. Then they get peanuts to hustle, somet’n easy. Or ice cream cones. Those little trays over there near the door. They ain’t breakin’ their ass for nothin’, don’t worry.”

Ira was beginning to understand: little trays near the door. “Ice cream cones in those?”

“Yeah. Fifteen cents a throw. Same as soda. Wait’ll you see Moe.” Izzy grinned.

“What d’you mean?”

“With his ice cream. Sometimes he gets peanuts after scorecards, but when he gets ice cream, he’s — you’ll see him. He’s short; he’s got a hooked nose an’ big blue eyes.” Izzy chuckled. “Everybody knows him.”

“You talkin’ about Moe?” the hustler bagging peanuts on Ira’s left asked. He was swarthy, short but supple. “That sonofabitch, he’d eat the linin’ out of a cunt. Did you ever see him down at the beach? That’s always where he goes when there’s no game.”

“Yeah?”

“He never goes in swimmin’. Lays around the beach. Jesus, he can see a pussy through a bathin’ suit.”

“That’s Moe, all right,” Izzy confirmed. He turned to Ira. “He was a shlepper , and a cake of ice fell on his foot. So he gets all the breaks,” And to the other hustler, “Ain’t he the cats with ice cream, Steve?”

“I don’t know why the hell Walsh gives it to him. He brings half of it back melted.” Steve swung a bag of peanuts closed. “Jesus.” He glowered dangerously. “I thought we’d be outta here by now. Play a few innings o’ handball.”

“They must be expectin’ a big crowd,” Izzy surmised.

With as many hustlers as possible crowded about the hampers, the peanuts were bagged at last. They were free to leave. It was now about 11:30 A.M. They streamed out of the big utility room. “Here’s where you come back an’ get your checks.” Izzy indicated the large zinc-covered counter, with drawers under it, and a heavy drawbridge like a portcullis in front. The place had been at Ira’s back while he bagged peanuts. It was adjacent to the main passage through which they’d entered.

“Get checks?” Ira asked.

“Later. When he calls you. You stand in front there.” And as they came out from the cavernous utility room into the gloom under the stands, “I’ll show you later. Right now you gotta get your white coat an’ hat. Or you can’t get in again. Get the idea?”

Ira followed Izzy to the cloakroom — presided over by Benny Lass. All of the hustlers crowded in front of the cloakroom counter, and with imprecation and reviling, Benny hurled their uniforms at the boys. Ira’s hat was too small.

“I’ll change it for you,” Izzy volunteered. “He needs about a seven and a quarter, Benny.” Izzy proffered the hat.

“Why the hell didn’t he ask for it? What the hell is he? Dumb? What the fuck kinda hustler you gonna be?” Benny demanded. “Can’tcha open yer mout’?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Next time you’ll wait till the last one.” Benny threw the larger-size white hat at Ira.

What had he been saying to his wife, darling woman? No, she wasn’t at the washing machine, which was installed just outside his study door. He thought she was at the washing machine, because the appliance whirled merrily about, and he thought she was there. Women didn’t have to wait in attendance on washing machines any longer, thanks to technology. The machines were computerized; after they were set spinning, they went through cycles on their own, rinsed on their own, drained, stopped on their own.

What had he been saying to her? But he was digressing. Then digress within the digression. Was he afraid he wouldn’t return to the main theme? Oh, the past was there, not like an inert lump, to be sure, malleable still, but only within limits. After he had said what he had said to her, she murmured to herself at the washing machine, almost to herself, “I can’t stand it when you get depressed. When you get depressed, I get depressed. I want you to be happy.” Ah, beloved wife. . so interwoven within him, as he within her. What would they do without each other? She was steady enough to survive losing him; what would he do in the other event?

But he chose to ignore the question, admittedly more difficult, and thought instead of their lunch of tea and toast, peanut butter, apple butter. Ira had said to her, “I wrote a piece about my experiences as a plumber’s helper in Freshman Composition, second half of my freshman year. The instructor thought it merited printing in The Lavender, the CCNY literary magazine.”

“How old were your teachers?” M asked.

“One, Dickson, I think may have still been in his twenties, late. He gave me a D in the course. And Kieley was middle-aged, fifty or so.

“But in the second semester of Freshman Composition, which I took in sophomore year, everything turned around. We were instructed to write descriptions for our weekly theme papers, and my grades were suddenly quite good. Mr. Kieley — I think his specialty was Edgar Allan Poe, and maybe he too was partial to the bottle — would get up and say, ‘Once again the star of the class has given us a fine specimen of a description.’ It was mine. Now why the hell didn’t they encourage this guy? At nineteen, think of it, how close I was to all this: the bus conductor, the ballpark soda hustler. A hundred other things I could have dug up for long themes, or maybe salable sketches, given the encouragement, the incentive.”

“Teachers work pretty hard,” said M. “They may not have had energy enough left to spend on you.”

“No, I don’t think that was the case. When CCNY gave me the Townsend Harris medal for notable achievement — and what a sinker of a bronze medal it was! — I told them that I hoped they didn’t let other guys flounder around at a loss the way I did. At that age you’re usually not autonomously activated, not confident; that’s true only of the mature writer. At that age, unless the guy is a prodigy, he needs assignments, a definite theme, a project.”

“We were taught one thing at Chicago,” said M. “How to write acceptable exposition. How to get our thoughts in connected form, cut out waste in a paragraph.”

“I would have been out on my ear,” said Ira. “I never learned how to do it.”

Ha! At his desk again, he threw his head back, vocalized his breath. He couldn’t say why he did so: compound of regret, wordless expletive imbued with all the days and years gone by, expletive inveighing against time alone, the abstract past. .

Self-conscious at first in his white raiment, Ira trailed Izzy out of the ballpark. They had a couple of hours to themselves, during which most of them ate their noonday meal. A few blocks away was the restaurant where many of the hustlers had dinner. It was a restaurant combined with a saloon, but one that served nothing more potent than “near beer,” a brew whose alcoholic content did not exceed one half percent. There were white tablecloths, waiters, a large dining room with mirrors, buffalo horns adorning the walls — and a large reproduction of Custer’s Last Stand . Depicted in it, the last, doomed remnant of blue-coated U.S. Army regulars vainly held off hordes of torso-naked, buckskin-fringed Indian braves. Frenzied with victory, they wielded tomahawks against the few survivors, or ripped the gory and all too realistic scalps from the heads of fallen foes. Custer himself stood proud and erect, aiming pistol, brandishing sword. Never did scalped heads look so meaty.