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

Zaida peered again, frowned: a whole lifetime of trial by ordeal. Give up, get caught, admit, deny, brazen it, or jump down to the street, to a flight, how high? Height lessened by hanging from bottom fire escape, maybe only break a leg, not killed. Or up fire escape, to the roof, better. Or under bed.

“ Noo , sleep if you’re sleeping. Sleep until Jonas comes. Oy, vey iz mir .” The old man turned away heavily. “A plague on this night. Something went wrong with my sleep.”

He shuffled back toward the bedroom light.

“I heard multitudes clamoring and braying in strange tongues to the sky, and yet I understood: see, it is not perfect, they howled: see, it is not perfect. Noo? Ha? Raboinish ha loilim , if Thy thought fills the universe, why do we suffer? Then how can Thy thought be perfect? An imp crawled out of the shofar and screamed: There must be a flaw? Foolishness. Foolishness. Oh, why does the Messiah delay?”

Yawning noisily, Zaida scratched under his yarmulke, entered his bedroom. The door closed. The light under it quenched.

Two clocks in the front room ticked, minced each other’s intervals. . synchronized. . diverged. .

“I’m going,” Ira rasped.

“Wait, a little more,” Stella implored. “He’ll fall asleep. Another minute, and you’ll be sure.” She tugged at his arm.

“I can’t wait. Your father’ll be here next. Jesus Christ.” He elbowed her hand away. Stupid bitch, he’d had to fuck her tonight. “Come with me. When I go, you go.”

The bland face lifted upward in the gloom, susceptible, suppliant: “You want me to come with you?”

“Yes.” Hectic with impatience, he could have raved. “He won’t hear me.” Ira brandished the shoes in his hand. “He’ll hear you. Go right up to the door. If he says anything, say it’s you.”

“What’ll I say?”

“Oh, shit. The lock. Any goddamn thing. Somebody you heard. You’re making sure!” Nudging her ahead, his chubby patsy, he tiptoed after: on stockinged feet seeking cover under the soft tread of her house slippers—

“Mamie?” came from the other side of Zaida’s bedroom door. “Is that you, Mamie?”

Ira gesticulated, jabbed at the lock, mimed, rolled his wrist about frantically.

“I thought I heard somebody turn the lock, Zaida,” Stella said, and at Ira’s furious nod, “I’m going to make sure.”

“Who is it? Is it you, Stella?”

“Yes, Zaida.”

“Don’t open the door.”

“No. I just wanted to see if it’s locked.”

Ira pushed her ahead. On toenails to the door, his face all crookedly twisting, he eased back the bolt of the lock, eased open the door, nodded fiercely at Stella, crept out. The door swung to, bolt slid back, all in one interval, with his feet trampling into his shoes on the landing. Let her explain it as best she could. He was out. He was free.

Free! Out! Out in the clear! Never mind laces. Down the stairs. Never mind tripping. Hold banister. Down to the ground floor. Foyer, foyer, foyer. Out. Street. Raven sky-wings brooding streetlamps. Roc’s eggs. Nutty. Dodge in between parked cars. Dodge. Ha. Get across, before anybody — Jonas comes. Now: on the double, triple, move your hams, move your good old kosher hams. Hear that, Zaida, pow, pow, pow, wow, screwed her, your grandchild in flagrante copulante, in flagrante copulante —and oh, boy, was it good. . He passed two doorways. . three doorways. . four. . miracle, to get out of there. . past Puerto Rican grocery: Hernandez.

Mr. Hernandez, mind of yours truly, Johnny Dooley, steps on your nice, dark iron step to tie — oh boy, oh joy — his laces on? Oh boy, oh joy, got away with it! Now to get rid of that — sticker-tape, ticker tape, dicker-tape, pricker tape, frick-her tape, like Joyce: Sinbad the Sailor, and Tinbad all bad — hope it’s still — belly pulled in, and with furtive glance over his shoulder, Ira thrust his hand down under pants belt to pinch the condom loose — and froze. Rigid. Smitten motionless with panic. He had the condom all right; he pulled it up, imminent in pallid phallic plane view and faint semen smell. But the notebook, the notebook! Had he left it on the Yiddish newsprint of Der Tag ? You goddamn boob! Had he? Reckless with alarm, he pitched the condom up in the air toward the curb — no, no, no, he dug his hand into his breast pocket: he had it, he had it! And he had his notebook, too. Boy, what luck! What luck! He had it still! Had it. Had left no incriminating evidence — huh? Could that little guy coming across the street from Lenox Avenue — shrimp of a guy: looked like Jonas. Christ, that condom so rashly flung just now. He’d tossed it in the air: high as a flaunt, taunt, kid’s sparkler. Pale as a slug. Wan in the gutter and full of his sparks. Beat it.

Beat it. He headed east, through Monday’s early-morning darkness, legs driving, clicking heels in the deserted street in a rush to leave. Got away! Scot-free. Scut free, too, he got. Scut free, scot-free. He-e-e-ya! If that was Jonas? Nah, some other little shrimp.

III

Hurrying, he crowed his wordless exultation aloud, his cock-crow aloud, and headed east, straight toward Park Avenue. He was the luckiest guy alive, luckiest punk alive, luckiest prick alive, luckiest bastard alive, alive-o. Before him, he could see a fire burning under the great gray viaduct of the New York Central Railway on Park Avenue, a fire in a big steel drum. Just as a Pullman with dim windows rumbled by overhead on wheels muffled by the solid trestle, the flames on the ground below spewed upward. Dreaming in the Pullman, they never dreamed a fire was burning in a drum in the pushcart district beneath them, never knew they were rolling over a Jewish pushcart district, never knew he, Ira Stigman, had paused beside the open phone booth at Gabe’s Wholesale Produce on the corner to watch them roll by in the night, never knew him, never knew his wild escapade, his frenzied escape, those up there, sleeping peacefully in trains named Lake George, Fort Collins , and Atlanta . He felt like tarrying a minute with the thought, tarrying to recover norm. The flames lit up the underside of the trestle to lurid parasol of yellow and scarlet, and lit up the cross-braced pillars too, fitfully, so that they almost seemed in motion, legs of a huge, ambling myriapod. It felt so good leaning against the phone booth, just leaning, subsiding, surceasing. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well . Was that from Lear ? No, Macbeth . Only he wasn’t sleeping, just enjoying escape, blissful fugitive. Boy, that was good. Better than with Minnie that time. Nice and plump and fresh and humid. Beautiful, beautiful back-scuttle. Celestial back-scuttle. Boy, you could get another hard-on thinking about it. If he ever let himself pull off, that was what he would think about. How could anything be so wonderful and so vile, so rotten, so dirty, and so heavenly? Jumpin’ Jesus. Figure it out. Oh, easy: it was you.

Near the drum a large truck was parked, and the blaze from the drum played on a sturdy young fellow on the tailgate who shoveled refuse swept into a heap on the floor of the truck to fuel the blaze: broken slats of vegetable crates, fruit wrappers, packaging material, trash. Each shovelful damped the flames momentarily, flames that leaped up again, hurling light as far as the granite wall at 111th Street, where the massive ramp began. Firelight lapped the stoops of tenements and skimmed along the store windows of the closed, scruffy little shops at the base of the tenements that flanked the pushcart district that found shelter beneath the trestle. . where Mom shopped Sunday mornings — Ira’s lip curled — in the good old days.

Brief spell of respite, damaged respite, like everything else in his life. Then passage again: Ira on the sidewalk exchanged cursory inspection with the young fellow on the truck, felt the moment set in his mind as if it were some kind of a cerebral casting. Passing on, he glanced inside the wide-open sliding doors of Gabe’s: two men were in there, a hulking one with a metal-clad clipboard, and a stumpy one with a push broom. On one side of them in the weak light, stacks of crated produce lined the wall; on the other, from sliding door to back wall a crowd of tarpaulin-covered pushcarts were jammed in for the night.