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

Ira’s prudence — or cowardice — prevailed: they limited their swindling to a couple of dollars apiece per weekend. Even then, Ira felt uneasy. “Let’s cut it out altogether,” he urged. “What the hell. For a couple of bucks. What the hell will it look like on your record if some big guy steps behind the counter and tells us we’re under arrest? You say you hope to be a petty officer in the Navy someday.”

“No, you don’t mean to tell me one o’ those fat I-talian ladies waddles in heah with three, fo’ kids is goin’ to step back heah and put the ahm on us. Yo got mo’ sense than that, Iry,” Bob blandished. “That’s a safe sale, an’ you know it.”

“Yeah, but somebody else could be watching. The fat lady may be just a decoy.”

“Aw, come on. Listen, tell you what ah’ll do: instead of us going to that gin mill Saturday night, we-all go to my girl’s place. I’ll tell her to get one of her friends for you.”

“Yeah?. . Thanks.”

“What d’y’all say?”

“No, I can get all I want.”

“This one’s a real cutie. I laid her myself.”

“No, I’m cutting out the—” In the face of Bob’s eager candor, Ira felt his shrug was churlish. He riffled the stack of white waxed bags on the marble counter. “I got my dough back, and more. I’m not takin’ any more chances, that’s all. I’m ringing up every sale. No more sales slips back.”

“Suit yo’self.” Bob was clearly miffed.

“You do a thing regularly like that, you’re asking for it,” Ira commented darkly.

“How come you so sure?”

“I’m sure, all right.”

And it wasn’t more than two weeks later that the clerks were agog with tales of a night-shift team like theirs that had been caught doing the same thing they were guilty of. Only they had gone Ira and Bob one or several better: they had a number of sales slips in reserve, sales slips with different prices on them, and the one they had been caught passing was for a two-pound heart-shaped box of fancy chocolates, with nuts and rich fudge centers, costing two-fifty. They were both fired, but not before they signed a confession of guilt, in lieu of being hauled into court to face petty-larceny charges.

“We were lucky,” Ira said to Bob. “See?”

“A two-pound box o’ nonpareils. They must’ve thought they were in business fo’ themselves. Two-fifty a clip.” His lips pursed in generous confession. “I’m just kiddin’, Iry. Y’all were right that time. You’re purty smaht.” He moved away to attend to a blowsy woman just entering the store; she looked a little unsettled, to say the least: her hat was jammed all the way down to her eyebrows like a fuchsia bucket with a green flower on it.

“Yes, ma’am. What can I do fo’ you, ma’am?” Bob’s address was punctilio itself. “Can I he’p you, ma’am?”

She looked like a freak, but she could be just the type of customer who could put the arm on them, as Bob phrased it.

Ira went back to the cage and sat down behind the cash register. Idly, Ira watched Bob dig the candy scoop into the dark slope of malted milk balls under the glass counter, then into the mound of peanut clusters. No, probably not. The dame was probably straight, was just what she seemed to be: a mama, maybe some widow returning from the shop or factory, bringing home a treat for herself and the kiddies, bringing home “bong-bongs,” as Ira had jested with Larry. No, Ira wasn’t “smaht,” though it flattered him that Bob thought so. Bob slid the scoop under the pile of paper-wrapped nougats, pale surfaces flecked with citrus. No, Ira wasn’t smart. He just learned on his own hide, the only way he seemed able to learn. For a moment, a small cloud settled on the white-topped soda tables in front of the cage. Wherever his eyes roved, from the large double doors opening on 149th Street to the soda fountain tended by henna-skinned Jeffrey, the cloud roved; and embedded in it was a silver-filigreed fountain pen. The nightmare of Stuyvesant High School had taught him a little, anyway. Ira had quit just in time. But what a damned fool he was to run that risk for ten bucks. Oh, it was a lot of money, but compared to what might have happened to him — what a damned fool he was, and yet Ira had done the same thing in his bus-conductor days, swiped nickels; nearly croaked when the spotter in the car yelled at him. And this time to have the dick come around the counter and say “You’re under arrest” would have killed him. Smart. Ira was smart in the other sense, when “smart” meant hurt.

Yet this newly acquired wisdom did not constrain him on his visits to 112th Street. He continued to use any imaginable ploy to visit Stella, growing bigger, plumper, at sixteen. She was his regular one, and he hated passing up a Monday visit that fall and winter. Larry could not understand why he refused to accompany him after classes on Monday evenings. Again and again, Larry invited him for supper in the new apartment on West 110th Street to which Larry’s mother and he had moved. With Irma married, and the uncle traveling, they lived alone now.

Nonetheless, Ira adamantly declined Larry’s invitation. “No, I gotta catch up on work,” was Ira’s unfailing excuse. “Can’t do it. Thanks. Can’t do it. Jesus, am I ever failing.” Boy, give up his only chance for a nice piece of ass that week in exchange for a couple of lamb chops or broiled salmon and fresh peas — and have to listen to Larry’s enthusiastic disquisitions about his latest artistic outlet: the stage, and the flair he had for acting.

The trouble was that visiting Mamie’s was regular, every Monday evening, regular. Oh, he was great at maneuvering, keeping a straight face. He was a wonder when it came to that: maneuvering, waiting, stalling, stalking — hey, that was another pretty good one: stalking, he’d have to underline the stalk — what the hell was he talking about? It was the regular, regular, that’s what he was talking about; that was what was gonna trip him up. With Stella, the same as with the fountain pens, regular, the same thing he had warned Bob about. Monday, one after another. Cut it out then. He couldn’t. Couldn’t. As long as he knew it was there. Christ, he finger-fucked her when she had the monthlies and she pulled him off. That was all right, as long as he had someone else doing it, someone else coming with him.

Better he took up Bob’s offer of getting him a lay. Better, but he couldn’t. That was the worst of it. He knew he wouldn’t get a hard-on now. Scared with grown-up girls who knew all about it. That’s what fucking kids had done to him, fucking Stella when she was fourteen, taking Minnie when she was eleven. .

Ruined. . long ago. . and that was why performance with words was the only option open to him, the only tramway out of himself. Conveyor belt: and on it, like chunks of ore cut out of a gloomy mine (mind): words, words, extricating himself from Joyce by Joycean means. Well, perhaps not words alone: anything innovative might do as substitute, anything exploratory, visionary, even quixotic: the thing Pop did when he was eighty-seven. He bought the old Turner farm on Church Hill Road in Maine above where the Stigmans had lived, an old run-down farm on the crest of the hill, and a horse and old buggy for transportation to town (the Kennebec Journal ran a feature on the old coot and his hay-burner) — and he died a year and a half later in Bellevue Hospital, the pathetic, damned old fool. .

The overwhelming notion of his own death now lay imminent in him. And he recalled the morning when M had smiled at him wisely. “If you’re not all right, I can’t be all wrong.” And she had added something he couldn’t remember now about either one not living if the other didn’t and he had seconded the notion of not living, seconded it all too heartily. L’chaim , the Jews said when downing a libation: to life . Apart from the correctness of the Hebrew, the toast might just as well have been L’met . To death. It would serve him just as well: L’met . Well met.