Departure Page 16

  She was fond of saying, “I like a man who wakes up glad. I like a cheery smile in the morning. I like a joke. I like the morning it should be what God made it for, the brightest part of the day.”

  That was the way Fred Tully woke up, and in the course of some years, she had repeated that information to everyone who would listen. She might have fastened on other things, but this took her fancy. She might have said of Fred Tully that he didn’t drink as much as other men did in the part of Greenpoint where they lived. He went on a bender once in a while, but in the course of things he was a good, solid family man, a good provider, and rid of most of his wild ways as he passed the middle part of his thirties. He was good-looking, big-shouldered and tall, but a little stooped after seven years of sitting in a hack. He had once claimed a terrible temper backed up by hamlike fists, but he never used his hands against his wife and he would die before he would put a finger on one of the children.

  Now a tire of fat around his belly took the edge off him, and when he rolled on the floor with the kids in the morning, making them late for school, he looked so much like a large, good-natured dog that his wife would say, “Now is that right for a man to be down on his stomach, wriggling like a beast?”

  He woke up glad; he woke up singing. For him, the morning, the very early morning, was the best part of the day. The three boys and the girl would all pile into the bed, and he would roughhouse them over his wife’s sleepy anger. He would whack them out of bed and into the bathroom. Once the priest had warned his wife that this sort of thing, a man and three boys and a girl, all half-naked, could lead to bad things, but Fred had said to her, “The hell with that—it only leads his fat head into his pants.”

  Fred put up the coffee himself. When he opened the can, he sniffed and sang. He sang as he measured the coffee. He sang crazy songs that he picked up from the characters in the garage, and no one had ever heard such songs in the neighborhood before, songs like, “Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick, gimmick—” and then with the kids joining in—“down to the bottom!”

  Nobody in the whole house slept after the Tullys got up. There was no peace either, until he left with the kids, sometimes walking with them all the way to school. On the way, they sang; like characters, people in the neighborhood said. So when Tully’s wife always came around to explaining that he woke up glad, it was in the way of an apology, too. Sometimes, she felt it would be more comfortable if Tully were like other people; sometimes, it even occurred to her that other people said stronger things about Tully. But she had been married to him a long time; she was used to him; and now that no more children came, God be praised, she sometimes found herself being in love with him like a schoolgirl.

  Fred Tully knew that he woke up glad. He stayed glad, cheerful, easy, for about two or three hours after he got into his hack. Then it got him; every day it got him. It had been that way since the first day he went out, and he had been sitting in a hack for seven years now. By noon, usually, the morning was like a dream. Before he became a hack, he had worked in a dozen different places, mills, factories, warehouses. Twice he had driven a truck. But nothing like hacking; hacking he hated; he despised hacking. In the beginning, he would have given it up for any decent job; now, with the war over, he turned in about sixty a week, and you don’t give up sixty a week no matter how you hate it.

  By noon, this day, it was as bad as it ever was, always in midtown, heavy traffic, people in a resentful mood. Long ago, he had noticed how moods seem to run different, from day to day. “I wake up glad,” he would tell himself, “I wake up glad, and by twelve o’clock, I’m like this.”

  He wanted a drink; when he wanted a drink that way, badly and savagely, in the middle of the day, he knew the storm signals were up; he knew it was hair trigger from here on. When he wanted a drink that way, he pulled in somewhere, had a sandwich and two or three cups of coffee, and kept his mouth shut. He kept his mouth shut in the lunchroom, and he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the afternoon. He went home, and the kids knew the way he was and left him alone. His wife knew the way he was, and thought to herself, “Well, he’ll wake up glad. Let him get to bed now.”

  Today, he had his coffee and a sandwich and got back into the cab; he never said a word. When some guys came in who knew him, and said, “Hey, Tully,” he just nodded. When they got into an argument about the union and started in on the old refrain, “There’s nothing in the world as dumb as a hack—there’s nothing so low as a hack. In the whole world, everything’s organized, but not the hacks. Go tell a hack something—tell him what’s good for him. What about it, Tully?” he just nodded, finished his coffee and got out. He picked up fares and took them where they wanted to go. He had seven fares working downtown, and then a long one up to Eighty-second Street and Park Avenue. He didn’t look at faces, continued to want a drink, and didn’t answer when a customer tried to be pleasant. It was four o’clock when he turned east on Eighty-second Street and picked up a woman near the corner of Lexington.

  When the woman got in, Tully just glanced at her. He had no center rear view in his cab, and it wasn’t until later that he turned around to look at her. His first impression was just a dame in a good fur coat, yellow hair, and a polished face. The face was set and expressionless, and didn’t tell anyone anything, and she gave him an address on Fortieth Street between Fifth and Sixth, grading the words in a flat, hard voice. He knew that kind of face and that kind of voice; as he started down Lexington, he took his lower lip between his teeth and held it there.

  Traffic was heavy on Lexington; he made five blocks on the first light, only three on the second, and then the woman in back said to him, in that same, expressionless voice, “Why don’t you stop squeezing nickels and turn up to Park?”

  Tully turned west, and then downtown on Park. He felt little needles in his spine, and he hunched forward over the wheel. But it was slow on Park, too; it was one of those days when everything jams up, and it’s slow all over the city.

  “This is fine,” his fare said. “This is fine. This is just fine.”

  Tully didn’t answer.

  “I adore cab drivers,” she said.

  The needles were jabbing at Tully now; they went in and out, cutting his flesh. At Forty-seventh Street, he turned west again. They jammed up in the line of cars waiting to spill out onto Madison and Fifth.

  “You couldn’t have done it better,” the woman in back said.

  Grinding his teeth over the flesh of his lower lip, Tully jerked the car into neutral and raced the motor. It was an old Packard, his cab, and the vibration of the motor promised to fling it apart. He didn’t care; he wanted the motor to drop out onto the street. He’d walk away and leave it. Then the lights changed and the cars ahead pulled away. With horns shrieking, Tully moved to the corner and was caught there by another light.

  “You planned that nicely,” she said.

  Tully put the car in neutral again. He turned slowly, knowing that the future was wild; here went everything. He looked at the woman and then he turned back. He tried to smile. What sense did it make? He brought home sixty dollars a week, and he woke up glad. And with all the kids getting out of the army, you couldn’t go out and pick up a job around the corner.

  But in his mind’s eye was planted a picture of the woman. He had carried a thousand like her, and the mink was the same and the hair was the same, and the face, too; but it always flashed into his head, with insane regretfulness, that he’d never go to bed with a woman like that, like out of the window of Saks Fifth Avenue, he’d never touch one, he’d never get close enough to the face to know if you could get your fingernails under it and peel it off.

  Then the light changed and he turned onto Madison.

  “Why didn’t you go across to Fifth?” she asked.

  He noticed how his knuckles stood out, like white spots.

  “I said, why don’t you go to Fifth?”

  “I figured Madison was better,” Tully said softly.

  “I’m late—can’t yo
u understand that?”

  He was talking now; it was no use to try to stop talking. “Look, lady, I know my business. It’s bad on all the avenues this time of day.”

  “I ought to take your number,” she said.

  “What the hell—” He put the car into gear and moved slowly down Madison.

  “What did you say?”

  He didn’t answer; then he looked over his shoulder and saw that she had her purse open and was writing down his number.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. He didn’t glance back until the next light. She was completing the information from his card.

  “Look, lady,” he said. “It don’t make sense to turn me in.”

  “Shut up and tend to your driving.”

  “That’s what I’m doing, lady,” he said evenly. “The cab ain’t got wings.”

  The traffic started again, and Tully made two blocks before the light changed. In those two blocks, Tully thought of all the hacks who made a practice of recounting experiences with women like this one; but Tully never had any such experiences, and he always thought of the hacks as liars. In two blocks, underneath his fury, underneath the mounting rage that made him tremble, that made his gizzards and his bowels tremble, he couldn’t get out of his mind the crazy fancy of a woman like this one telling him to take her somewhere, and then telling him to come upstairs to an apartment with her. He couldn’t get it out of his mind, not even when the light turned and she said to him:

  “You cheap chiseler.”

  He couldn’t get it out of his mind as he deliberately opened the door of his cab, walked back to her, opened her door and called her some of the filthiest names he knew. As she screamed, flecks of the spittle blew in his face, but he still couldn’t get the picture out of his mind. Not even when he saw the cop coming; it still sandwiched in between her angry screams, sandwiched in between the reflection that this was it, that all the time it was coming to a poor fat slob, whose only virtue was that he woke up happy in the morning.

  The Police Spy

  THIS IS THE tale of a police spy who became something other than a police spy, and his name was Bondar Shar. He was a young man, but you would not have thought so to look at him, what with circles under his eyes and the worries stamped on his brow. It was not alone due to the fact that he had a wife who was always ailing and five children who never had enough to eat, but also because he was the special police spy of Widee Shimer.

  Widee Shimer was District Organizer for the Communist Party of India in the central are of the northwest; which meant that his territory stretched from the Sind in the west to the Punjab in the northwest, to Tibet to Nepal. In truth, a kingdom, and even an empire, as some might style it; but a Communist Party organizer in India being neither a king nor an emperor, Bondar Shar most often considered that central area to be an abomination, pure and simple.

  For all of this immense area, Widee Shimer did not have an automobile; indeed, not even a tonga, not even a bullock cart, only his own two feet, and occasionally a ride on a train if he was going a real distance, like a hundred or two hundred miles. For the most part, he walked. Shimer was small and brown and wiry, and the skin on the bottom of his bare feet was tougher than leather. When he set out to go from one place to another, he moved at a sort of dogtrot that ate up a steady six miles an hour, even in the hot weather of the summertime, when the alcohol in the thermometer rises to one hundred thirty and even one hundred forty degrees. Down the dusty roads he would trot, with a cheerful good morning for everyone, for the bullock drivers whom he passed as if they were standing still, for the tonga drivers, whom he passed as if they were moving just a little, for the workers in the fields, for the water carriers, for the fat priests and for the skinny children, and for the young girls who smiled at him so shyly and sweetly.

  And behind him came Bondar Shar, his police spy, cursing or growling or grumbling—and sometimes literally weeping with fatigue and rage. It is said that in other countries, where the rulers are rich and powerful and have money to burn, police spies work only eight hours a day, and panderers and informers even less. That may be; but in India, a police spy works the clock round. The rule is: for one Communist, one police spy. The resident police chief himself laid down the law. “After all,” he said, “the empire is not what it used to be. If a bloody red can carry on, it seems to me a police spy should damn well be able to carry on, too.”

  So Bondar Shar carried on, sometimes weeping aloud with rage at the life he led and the calling he pursued. Sometimes, in desperation, when Widee Shimer set out on one of his journeys, Bondar Shar would hire a tonga, but the tonga driver would have to whip his little horse to keep up with Shimer, and sooner or later that led to an altercation between Bondar Shar and the driver. Often enough, hot words led to blows, and Bondar Shar would find himself in a fight while Widee Shimer trotted merrily away.

  It was enough to depress a tougher man than Bondar Shar. Every morning, he had to rise before it was light. Drugged with weariness, he would plod through the back alleys of Old Delhi, to the little shed outside and behind a bearer’s hut, where Widee Shimer spread his pallet and slept. Slept, but did not live; as Bondar Shar would whimper to his wife, “The cursed man lives in a thousand places at once.”

  And Bondar Shar had to be there early, for at 5 A.M., as by the clock, Shimer would be up and going, off to party headquarters, where the red flag flew, or out into the countryside to a meeting of peasants, or deep into the rat race of Old Delhi to one of the printing depots.

  It reached the limits of human endurance, and though some say otherwise, a police spy is human. It reached a point where Bondar Shar had to act, and for days he deliberated upon various courses of action. There were certain bad men in Old Delhi who did things for a price, but Bondar Shar was not certain that they would kill a Communist organizer; and, even if they were willing, where would he find the price? A killing is not a tonga ride; twenty rupees would be scarcely enough, and if word got out, the government might not approve. It was true that in the Punjab, when the government grew tired of a Communist organizer, they broke both of his legs and then tied him to a bed so that the bones knit crookedly, so that forever after one who saw a bearded Sikh waddling like a duck would recognize him for what he was; and it was also true that in Bengal they tore the fingernails out of Communist organizers and now and again cut off their thumbs. But right now the party was legal in the central area, and it might be a month or a year before it was illegal once more. And, being neither a yogi nor a fakir, the thought of a month or a year more of this drove Bondar Shar insane with despair. How many times did he say to himself, “Was ever a man so cursed?”

  Still, he deliberated, considering this and setting that aside, until finally he arrived at the only practical thing a man might do. And, having arrived at a decision, he kept his peace, told neither his wife nor his cronies, but put it into action the very next morning.

  It was still dark early that morning when Widee Shimer trotted out of the shed behind the bearer’s hut on his way to work, pausing only a moment to nod good morning to the police spy. But that morning, Bondar Shar did not wait until Shimer had reached the approved thirty paces of space, and then proceed to follow; rather did Bondar Shar reach out and grasp the sleeve of Shimer’s thin cotton shirt, telling him:

  “Hold on there. Now wait a moment.”

  Wait a moment, indeed, Shimer thought, wondering whether a surprise move for the suppression of the party had been decided upon overnight, and what his chances were for knocking Bondar Shar over and tying him up with strips of his dhoti. But Bondar Shar had forced a more ingratiating smile than any police spy would have allowed himself if he were about to make an arrest.

  “I thought we might talk,” Bondar Shar added quickly. “Here we are, the two of us, going here and there and everywhere together, and yet never a word passes between us.”

  It was true, and Shimer was forced to acknowledge it. He did usually nod good morning and smile in recognition at other
times, but never a word had been passed.

  “But a police spy is a police spy,” he said, choosing his words carefully and stifling any desire to indulge in invective.

  “And a police spy is human,” Bondar Shar returned.

  “True,” which was as far as Shimer would go; yet he found himself looking at the other, calculating his caste, which was probably Brahmin, his age, which could not be more than thirty, and his appearance, which was not uncomely, dark skin and clear brown eyes and good features, but woefully skinny, just as skinny as Shimer himself, and in that hungry land, there is a bond between skinny folk.

  “Human,” Bondar Shar repeated. “How many meetings have I sat through, listening to you speak and lead discussions, wedging myself in between walls, crawling on roofs and hanging onto windows? How many reports have I written? How many?”

  “A good many, no doubt,” Shimer said. “But I am already late, for there is an important conference at six o’clock. If you would walk along with me—”

  “And if I should walk the prescribed thirty feet behind, we would have to shout. On the other hand, if I am seen speaking with you—”

  “Who but bheesties and coolies will see us at this hour?” Shimer shrugged. “And who will they tell?”

  Bondar Shar nodded in resignation, and plodded along at Shimer’s side. “It is not that I listen without hearing,” he said petulantly, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “You speak of the masses and of the people. You speak of the workers and of those who eat too little. You speak of how you must help the people, know the people, come close to them. You speak of a better life for the people. How many times have I heard that and written it in my report thus: Widee Shimer assured the cotton workers that abetter life can be won.”

  “Many times, I am sure,” Shimer admitted.