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

With the lesson of his expulsion from Stuyvesant still vibrating in Ira’s consciousness, and with Pop’s hundred dollars amplifying the fearful reverberations of dishonesty — and with “spotters” on the lookout, about whom Ira had been alerted the very first day he was broken in — he was scrupulous to the point of penalty. His honesty was so far above reproach that it bred small shortages at the end of the day, disparities he had to make good out of his own stock of cash. Less than a week after he had begun work, he was transferred from the second to the first shift, the early-morning shift, which began at six and entailed a brisk walk in the freshness of nascent day from fetid tenement to the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, downtown terminal of the bus line. Irrelevant detail and treasured memory: the corner of Central Park, tree and grass, rocky outcrop and pond, still, and under canopy of wavering, fragile blue of predawn, humid, scented with verdure. .

It was while Ira lolled in the dingy, cigarette-reeking, cigarette-strewn anteroom, along with other conductors waiting their turn to “check in” at the end of their shift, that he was drawn aside by one of the older men, Ira’s senior by about forty years, Collingway, sour of visage and hard-bitten. “Listen, kid, lemme tell ye sompt’n. Yer makin’ it tough fer the rest of us. Ye know that? Goddamn tough.”

“Me?” Ira was startled open-mouthed. “How come?”

“Yer makin’ us look bad.”

“You? W-what’d I do?”

“Fer Chrissake, git wise to yerself. Yer toinin’ in every fare. Didn’t nobody tell ye yet? We all take a little rake-off. You ain’t. Waddaye think we look like?”

“Yeah, but there’s spotters.”

“Don’tcha know ’em yet? Foley an’ that other guy who sneaks in sometimes. You seen him in the back talkin’ to Hulcomb — the guy wit’ the cauliflower ear. Fitz, they call him.”

“Oh, that one? I saw him on the bus. That’s Fitz?”

“Oh, you did?” Collingway rubbed in his sarcasm. “You saw him on a bus. You keep up what yer doin’, and Hulcomb’ll hire a altogether different set o’ spotters fer a day, maybe a coupla private dicks from a detective agency. All they’d need is ride the buses one day, an’ half of us’d be shit outta luck. Maybe he’s got ’em already — because o’ you. If he wuzn’t so fuckin’ tight he sure would.”

“But nobody told me!”

“Chrissake, ye didn’t think the guy breakin’ you in wuz gonna spell it out fer ye?”

“But nobody else told me.”

“ I’m tellin’ ye. Yer gonna git in wrong wit’ the drivers too. We all buy ’em a little somp’n: a cold drink or a sandwich — ever buy any of ’em a pack o’ butts?”

“No. Nobody asked me.”

“Aw c’mon! Ye know what’ll happen to you?” Collingway jerked his head significantly. “Somebody’ll give ye a few good belts in the gut. The way they give it to one prick. He puked up his lunch, an’ he quit.” Collingway paused, to watch the effect of his words on Ira. “Christ, it’s easy. You git a pack o’ dem guineas in the mornin’, just drop de clock — like dat.” He let the clock roll around his index finger and hang there. “Git it?” His hand above the clock was curled into a hollow. “Most of ’em knows: they’ll slip you the jit. Or some old fat slob gits on, a Jew-woman maybe. She’s safe. Jesus, you ought to be able to tell ’em by now. A nigger gits on.”

Still, Ira was afraid. Pop’s hundred dollars was at stake. The very thought of getting caught made the terrible memory of the Stuyvesant crisis well up anew, as if just suffered. “Don’t dare steal a nickel,” Mom had enjoined. But against that now jangled Collingway’s sour, parting words: “You’ll sure as hell git in dutch wit’ everybody. Keep it up an’ you’ll find out.”

No use telling Mom or Pop about it. He knew what they’d say. Should he tell them anyway, and quit? Ask for Pop’s hundred dollars back? Or keep on doing the same thing as always: ring up every fare? But his receipts would continue to be more than theirs — every day, every day. He’d get beaten up. He could just envisage one of the drivers punching him in the gut over some pretext: the bell. “I told ye, ye punk! Hurry up on that bell.” Bell. Belly; where nobody could see. Pop at least had gotten black eyes. Oh, Jesus. Why hadn’t he asked Collingway how much should he try to swipe: a dollar? More?

Dispatched from 110th Street in the early morning, the driver took the bus uptown along Fifth Avenue to the side of Mount Morris Park on 120th Street; there, he steered east a block to Madison Avenue, and then north again to the bridge over the Harlem River, the “turn-bridge,” and crossed over into the Bronx. A few blocks more, and the bus rolled into Grand Concourse— It was from then on, culminating in the wild melee on 149th Street, under the gloom of the Jerome Avenue elevated, confused in the lingering gloom before dawn, that hordes and hordes of Italian day laborers stood in wait, stood in droves. Like an invading army before the breach in the wall of a medieval city, they stormed the bus. They charged inside; with shout and outcry, with paper bags exuding garlic in fleeting passage, they swarmed up the spiral staircase, scaled the upper deck, jovial, boisterous, helter-skelter, crammed into every niche and foothold. They plied Ira with coins, jabbed them into the clock or jabbed them into his hand, heedless in their rush to find a seat — or just standing room. Pinned at last to the back rail of the bus, Ira could scarcely move, even less than they could. The day laborers took over, as a single body. They collected fares from delinquents on the steps of the spiral staircase, or from deep inside, where Ira could never hope to penetrate the crowd. They pulled the bell cord—“Let her roll.” They chorused directions at the driver—“Hey, walyo, give it the gun. Hey, walyo, step on it!” Irrepressible, garrulous, their Italian intonations impacting on English, in lusty good humor, young and grizzled gray, they hailed with hoot and guffaw fellow laborers stranded on street corners, and waving furiously for the already overloaded bus to stop, gesticulating hugely when it didn’t.

At last the growling, burdened, backfiring bus brought them to their destination — the far reaches of the Bronx. It was there, all along the Grand Concourse, that an immense building boom was in progress, there the lofty iron framework of new high-rise apartment houses loomed up near and far. That was the end of the line, and there, chaffering, bawling, with thrashing limb and brandishing redolent paper bag, they discharged, a cascading throng that made the bus rock with their departure — and there, for the first time, Ira was richer by about a dozen pilfered nickels.

He got the hang of it, became adept. Not only was the pack of day laborers in the morning a source of easy pickings, but he came to recognize “safe” passengers, the innocents who boarded the bus during the day: youngsters proffering nickels before they were well on the platform, Jewish mamas, old codgers with canes. He brought the driver refreshments and cigarettes, as the other conductors did, won grudging approval from hard-bitten Collingway, grudging because he didn’t think Ira was raking off enough.

“What’re ye scared of? You can go a little more. We’re all takin’ at least two bucks.”

Still, Ira felt he had reached his limit. A dollar, a little more than a dollar maybe, was already more than twenty nickels, more than twenty fares, twenty passengers, twenty people on the bus. No. He was scared. And then there was all that anxious calculating he had to do on the last run, before the bus pulled into the office-garage at shift change: when he waited his turn to report to the watchful clerk, the checker at the counter. Ira had to remember how much cash to claim as his own, and had claimed, how many fares the clock registered, how much cash he actually possessed, subtract the difference, maybe claim more or withhold a small amount not to excite suspicion when time came supposedly to disgorge all pockets in front of the checker. Do all this, and be an efficient conductor too, for it was still early afternoon when the first shift ended, and the bus fairly well patronized. A lot of finagling was required to keep records straight amid distractions and fluctuations of receipts during that last hour, and Ira was never good at mental arithmetic, and this was mental arithmetic under stress. It entailed going over and over his perverted accounting, to reassure himself he wasn’t about to betray himself. Over and over — while restraining a kid from getting off too soon, or cautioning a yenta to hold fast please, or turning away giddy at the sight of lilylike gams floating down the spiral stairs — and being snappy on the bell. He got by. Craftily, he made a practice of erring one way or the other by ten or fifteen cents, showing surprise when he was “over,” chagrin when he was “under,” like a somewhat slowwitted dub, perplexed by manifest evidence of his clumsy probity.