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

“No. He didn’t say mistake, he said honest,” Ira contested.

“But a whole hundred dollars! Gotinyoo! ”

“It’s only security.”

“And where’s the security for your hundred dollars? Do they give you a receipt?” Pop asked.

“I think so.”

“Oh, you think so. I wouldn’t give him without a receipt.”

“No.”

“And how soon do they repay?”

“I told you. The boss said the same day you quit. That’s what he told me.”

“A whole summer, and every week twenty-four dollars,” Pop considered receptively.

Deliberations continued for a long time. Nobody could deny that it was a bona fide bus company. Their buses ran along uptown Fifth Avenue for everyone to see. So. . they wanted a deposit. So. . Why were bus conductors considered so deceitful and dishonest? Would a coin cling to their palms more than an ordinary person’s? Noo . The upshot of their deliberations was, after much cautioning and behest, Pop would advance the hundred dollars.

“Don’t dare filch a nickel,” Mom warned. “You know well what happened to you.”

“Yeah.”

And Pop, in semi-humorous vein, recalling his own problems as a trolley car conductor, cautioned, “Get diarrhea, and you can bid farewell to the bus line.”

“I won’t get diarrhea.”

“And be discreet with drunkards and ruffians,” Mom admonished. “Always a soothing word allays a quarrel.”

“Uh! Here she is with drunkards and ruffians.” Pop took umbrage. “Because a mad, drunken sailor attacked me without warning in the trolley car years ago? His hands should be lopped off.”

“Indeed,” Mom placated. “I mean only that he should avoid facing up to a blustering goy . Let him be slaughtered. Call the driver for help. For a nickel it’s worth being assaulted?”

“I won’t be assaulted.”

His hundred dollars for security advanced, Ira was furnished with a visored cap, on which he paid a deposit out of his first week’s pay, as well as a numbered badge that attached to the cap. He was “broken in” in a single day by an experienced conductor, a veteran of only a few weeks himself. In the four round trips he made that day he learned the route, more or less, the main intersections of the Bronx, hitherto vague terrain. He learned the route and the ropes, he would aphorize later: the number of tugs on the bell cord that signaled stop, start, and emergency stop.

The buses were double-deckers — like the high-toned ones that ran downtown on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. But the fare was only a nickel, not a dime, and the buses were anything but high-toned. His initial training took place on the second shift, the slackest hours of the day, to enable him to concentrate on learning the street names along the route, the main intersections, and to familiarize himself with manipulating the “clock,” the handheld nickel counter, to make change in careful but collected fashion, and to gauge the exact moment when a passenger was safely on or off the bus, and then tug the bell rope without another moment’s delay.

He was on his own the following day, a solo conductor completely in charge of the job. He was assigned the same run: from afternoon to final return to depot at midnight. All by himself, reigning on the rear platform, in official capacity, the long afternoon. He gained confidence, congratulated himself on having settled into the job, even though he had had to hurry up front to the driver from time to time to ascertain where they were for the inquiring passenger’s benefit.

Near midnight, the bus on the last run — back to depot, where he would be held accountable for the day’s receipts — the strain of the new job, the anxiety, the staggering responsibility he felt those first hours, all told on him now: he became drowsy standing up. Streetlights, house lights went by like those of a strange city, withdrawn and aloof. He felt as if the bus had come from nowhere, was going nowhere. A few blocks from the Harlem River, a passenger got on the bus; the last passenger of the night, he dropped his jitney in the clock, and climbed the spiral staircase to the upper deck. The bridge, the swiveling bridge at Madison Avenue over the Harlem, would be approaching soon. Ira’s instructions had been to climb upstairs and warn all passengers to be seated, because the superstructure of the bridge was so low, and so close to the upper deck. He climbed up to the upper deck, stood waiting—

“Hey! Hey, you, conductor! Duck!” The alarmed cry came from the lone — and seated — passenger. “Watch it!”

Fortunate for Ira that he reacted in the nick of time. The dark steel superstructure whisked by overhead, only inches away from his visored skull.

“Jesus, fella,” said the lone passenger. “Waddaye tryin’ to do? Kill yerself?”

Ira learned, slowly as always, but he learned: that with rare exception, all women — and the fatter and more elderly the more prone — alighted from the bus facing the rear. One well-padded matron tumbled backward at a slight forward lurch of the bus. He pulled the bell cord in a trice thrice, and leaped down from the bus to assist her to her feet, apologizing profusely all the while. Jewish, and seeing that he was also, she deprecated the mishap. “It’s gurnisht . It’s nothing with nothing.” Pretty young girls daintily descending the spiral staircase, with flouncing dress inverted over high, lovely thighs like lilies, drove him into ecstasies of yearning when he chanced to look up. Transfixed, and all too often he brooded bitterly though transfixed, he would hear his impatient driver yell back at him, “Hey, Ira — a little faster on the bell!” And arriving at the sylvan Kingsbridge terminal, “Chrissake, Ira, what about a li’l more pep. Ye’ll have the next bus on my tail.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll try to make it snappy.” And all the time he mourned that he no longer could say, was disabled from saying, to the lissome damsel descending, as others his age would have said, “Watch your step, good-lookin’.” And being encouraged by an appreciative smile, as he had seen others so encouraged, Lotharios, cheeky and sportive: “What’s your phone number, good-lookin’? What about a date?” He no longer had access to that surface world, but was interdicted, like a mosquito larva under water of a ditch sprayed with kerosene. “To whom the goodly earth and air are banned and barred, forbidden fair,” he thought, echoing Byron in The Prisoner of Chillon . “Okay, I’ll try to make it real snappy.”

The buses were old, “older’n the hills,” declared one of the drivers. Obsolescent buses from a New Orleans bus line, bought by Hulcomb for a song, at the price of junk, so another driver asserted. They rattled and jounced, they growled and smoked. Tony Oreno, a driver with whom Ira was often paired, slightly built, and tending to be queasy, was twice sickened by fumes from the exhaust. He pulled up to the curb, got out, and retched at the side of the bus. Another driver, Colby, reported he had to bear down on his horn while he leaned out of the cab window to shout and wave at the cop directing traffic on Fordham Road not to halt traffic on the Grand Concourse — because the bus wouldn’t stop; the brakes were gone! Fortunately, the cop understood the desperate message — and obliged. Colby managed to steer his way to a stop.

Fares were tallied as soon as collected by the handheld “clock,” a kind of register of the day’s fares, which was furnished each conductor at the beginning of his run. The nickel was thrust into a slot at one end of the clock, which rang a small bell inside as it passed, at the same time increasing the number on the digital counter by one; then the nickel fell into the conductor’s palm. Conductors had to have some cash of their own in order to make change; and at the beginning of the tour each one had to declare how much cash he had on his person. At the end of his tour a most peculiar routine awaited him. He was expected to empty his pockets — of every cent of money. Receipts for the day were shown by the number of fares registered on the clock. These were deducted from the pile of cash the conductor heaped on the counter. And all surplus in excess of that claimed by the conductor at the outset — and again, before the accounting was made — was confiscated by the company: on the grounds that the surplus obviously indicated negligence on the conductor’s part in ringing up fares; so of course the surplus belonged to the company. Shortages too indicated negligence on his part in collecting fares; so of course he was docked.