Pride. William Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ meeting with other men and they go to work and come home together. Dad begins carrying a monkey wrench in his pocket, both to work and home again. He calls the people who beat him up ‘company goons’. In Popeye comics, there’s a character called Alice the Goon. She has a tiny head with no hair, a big body with thick arms and huge hairy feet. I keep thinking the company goons are something like Alice. Maybe Mom’s right; I’m probably too young to be afraid enough.

      I start going up to meet Dad where he gets out of the car he rides in to work with the other men. It’s at the corner of Radbourne Road; Hershafts’ Little Store is right there.

      I meet Dad outside the Little Store and walk home with him. Lots of times he stops in and buys me some candy or bubble gum or sometimes Tastykake cupcakes. He always says the same thing.

      ‘Share this with Laurel and don’t eat any of it until after dinner. You know what Mother would say.’

      When he comes home, even when he isn’t beaten up, he’s always white-faced, tired and dirty. He told me there are showers and a place to change clothes at work but he wants to get home early and he likes to start with clean work clothes every morning.

      We have an old washing machine and hand wringer in the cellar. Dad found that old washing machine in the dump and fixed it up. He rewired the motor. Dad can fix almost anything. Mom fills that washer with his clothes every Saturday and washes them separately; they’re too dirty to put in with other clothes.

      Dad always comes home through the alley and in the cellar door. He takes off his shoes down there and scrapes the black grease off them, leaving them by the furnace to dry. Whatever he does at work I don’t know, but it makes his shoes oily and wet. I know he’s working on big circuit breakers but that doesn’t mean anything to me. They’re being built for a giant dam in Russia somewhere. Dad told me that. It makes him proud to work on something that’s going all the way to Russia.

      Then Dad goes upstairs and takes a bath. I’ve watched him scrub his hands with a brush and 23 Skiddoo hand cleaner till he almost wore the skin off. When he comes down to dinner he’s always fresh in a white shirt with his sleeves turned up two turns to hide the frayed cuffs, but he looks clean and you’d never know he does such dirty work. The only thing that shows is he always has broken fingernails and bandages or a finger or thumb that’s been hurt. He usually has at least one finger black and the nail working its way off, too.

      About that same time is also when I found Mr Harding. Mr Harding lived at 7048 Clover Lane, the same side of the street we live on, next to the areaway. Mr Harding used to have a good job selling Four Roses whiskey. He was a salesman and sold Four Roses to bars and restaurants, but he lost his job when the Depression came.

      My mother said he lost it because he drank too much. Every bar or restaurant would give him a drink when he came in, and then he’d get drunk and couldn’t sell anything. Four Roses wanted him to sell whiskey but not drink it, I guess.

      Anyway, Mr Harding was on relief like about half the people in our neighborhood but he never looked for work. His wife got a job as a waitress at a bar up on Westchester Pike called the Sail Inn. Dad said you sailed in and staggered out. She ran away with the bartender there, at least that’s what the kids in the neighborhood say.

      One Saturday morning, early, I was meandering down the alley looking for things on trash day. Even with everybody so poor, there is always something worthwhile in the trash. If you wait until it gets to the dump, most of the best stuff’s already been picked over by the guys on the truck, so you need to go out before seven and look before they come.

      It was the beginning of that summer when we were building those last porches, but we didn’t work early Saturday mornings because that’s the day when Dad and Mom sleep late.

      One morning I found a perfectly good Sunbeam toaster worth twelve dollars new. My dad fixed it in about an hour. It’s the kind that makes a ticking sound like a clock while it’s toasting the bread, then pops up the toast when it’s finished.

      I also found an old portable Victrola in a black leather case like a suitcase. It’s one of those ones you wind up. Dad fixed that, too, and I keep it in the cellar to play sometimes in the evenings when I’ve finished homework or in summer when it’s too hot outside. I play old records Aunt Sophia gave me. They have great titles like ‘Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine’, and ‘It’s the Japanese Sandman’.

      So I’m going down the alley rummaging through trashcans and sometimes peeking into a garage when I look into Mr Harding’s garage and see him sitting all alone in his car in the garage. He looks blue and fat but I just think he’s drunk, maybe drove home, then fell asleep in his car before he could get out and go upstairs.

      I go on down the alley and then back up the other side. When I get to Mr Harding’s garage, I peek in and he’s still there. It doesn’t look as if he’s even moved. I’m still thinking he’s only drunk when I go into the garage. But then I see his eyes are open, staring through the windshield, and his tongue is purple and swollen, sticking out of his mouth. His thick hands are wrapped tight on the steering wheel.

      I’m sure he’s dead when I see the vacuum-cleaner hose attached to the tail pipe and going in the back window. It’s the first dead person I’ve ever seen except for my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and Aunt Emmaline. But they were different, in white coffins, and with flowers all around.

      I run out of the garage, leaving the two comic books and a torn-in-half Little Orphan Annie Big Little Book I’d found on the Greenwood side at the end of the alley. I run home trying not to cry and trying at the same time to get my breath. I’ve never fainted but I think I’m almost doing it.

      As I go in the cellar door, I first begin thinking how I’m going to tell Mom; and how I can keep from telling Laurel. I stand there and think of waiting till Dad comes home and telling him, I also think of going across the street, at the corner, on the other side of Clover Lane, and telling Mr Fitzgerald. He’s a policeman. But then I think how it might be a murder and they might think I did it. So by the time I get to the top of the cellar stairs I’m already yelling for Mom and crying.

      She’s washing dishes in her dressing gown and comes running, thinking I’m hurt or something. She drops to her knees the way she always does when she wants to really look at me and see if something’s wrong, although now, when she does that, my head’s higher than hers.

      ‘Mr Harding’s in his car in his garage and he’s dead.’

      ‘What do you mean he’s dead?’

      She’s still not believing me. She doesn’t look scared.

      ‘He’s sitting in his car and he’s blue and his eyes are open. He’s not drunk. He has the tube of his vacuum cleaner going from the back window to the tail pipe where the poison gas comes out. I think he’s dead, Mom.’

      I’m shaking now and can hardly talk. Dead people look so alive and at the same time so dead. Mom stands up. She’s not looking at me now. She grabs her dark reddish hair by both sides over her ears and stares at me with her wide green-gray eyes. Sometimes her eyes look like the green stuff that grows on the creek in summer, they’re that green; now they’re more white green.

      ‘Oh my God! Are you sure?’

      She knows I’m sure. She grabs hold of me, gives me a short hug, then dashes out from the kitchen, through the dining room, the living room and out our front door over to the Guinans’ to telephone the police.

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