Algren at Sea (47 page)

“O, that led directly
into
it. When I came up for discharge they told me I was entitled to a free operation so I would be able to breathe like a civilian, and the doc did such a good job, cleaning out my nose, that when I got back in civvies I found I could smell things I could never smell before—or that anybody else had ever smelled, for that matter. I could tell the smell of apples from the smell of pears from across the street of a vegetable store. I could smell the difference between a tomcat and his old lady. Put glue in a paste bottle and paste in a glue bottle and I could tell you you had those bottles mixed. I could smell things that you'd think didn't smell: Cardboard. Sawdust. Stamps. When I'd get on a street car—
Wow!
People smell strongest of all. In bars I got so I could tell whether it was Schlitz or Pabst in the schooner. Once a bartender bet me I couldn't tell bourbon from sour mash, and I won the bet—and one day—it was in the same bar—I told him he had a gas leak. Nobody else could smell it but me. I had to find it to prove myself, and I found it—his refrigerator. He called Some People's Gas and the guy they sent out couldn't smell it till I put his nose right
in
it. ‘With a nose like that you ought to be on my job,' he told me. ‘How much do you make?' I asked him. He got paid good. I went down there and they put me on as an apprentice smeller. But I rose through the ranks faster than I did in the army, and didn't have to get into a ring with anybody from West Virginia neither. I was there six months when I had my big success.”

He was gone again, gazing at some far horizon through the open port.

“You were saying you had a big success with Some People's Gas,” I reminded him when he looked ready to return.

“Why, the way it was with Some People's Gas was like this: sometimes I had to crawl around a roof and sometimes I had to crawl under the
street. Sometimes I had to make a hole in a floor and hang upside-down. Sometimes I had to scale a wall and sometimes I had to fight off dogs. One night, toward closing time, I was under a filling station looking for a screwdriver I'd put down and couldn't locate, when I smelled gas. It was a new station, using bottled gas, and the bottles weren't leaking. I couldn't find the leak, but I reported it.

“Now, they got
Historians
at Some People's Gas that can't smell bananas from noodle-soup, but they know every inch of pipe ever laid down in Seattle, and they gave the report to one of these Gasified Historians. He looked at his histories, he studied all the maps, and the report came back: No gas main ever laid in that area. ‘That wasn't southern fried chicken I smelled,' I told them in the office.

“The next Sunday morning the apartment building next to the station blew up, with a wedding party going on on the third floor. The bride was blown to bits, the bridegroom was maimed for life, the best man had a leg blown off and one of the bridesmaids got her spine snapped in two.

“I owe it all to that army doctor who done such a good job operating on me. I give him full credit.”

“You must have gotten a pretty good raise,” I suggested.

Smith began to revolve his head gently, trying to decide whether I was serious.

“Not exactly,” he told me, “I got fired the next week for intermeddling with Department of Gas Historians.”

I once went to New York for the skating at Rockefeller Plaza and was sharpening my skates when the telephone rang. A woman's voice, sounding like a cross between a crow's and a barbed-wire fence, informed me, “Alfred Bovine would like you for dinner.”

“I don't blame him,” I assured this charmer, and hung up. The phone rang right back.

“Don't you
like
lasagna?” the same voice inquired.

Realizing that Bovine had altered his plan of attack, I went down to the lobby with my skates under my arm.

They were waiting for me. I didn't place him right off, but he had the air of a pool-hustler who works days in an embalming parlor. He liked me too.

All the way to the restaurant they took turns recommending the lasagna.

“I'm a meat-eating mouse,” I had to let them know.

We entered one of those Italian joints where all the waiters look like they want another crack at Ethiopia.

“Three orders of lasagna,” Bovine decided.

“I'll eat anything that won't eat me,” I corrected him, “but I draw the line at the cheese-and-flour route. Give me an oyster stew, filet mignon rare with several well-chosen champignons.”

A lull like the grating of pebbles being dragged, against their common will, by an ebbing wave, ensued; yet the place was two miles from the sea.

“What do
you
do?” I asked the blonde just to see if she did anything but recommend lasagna.

“I work at Doubleday,” she told me, “but I don't like it. Nobody laughs at Doubleday.”

I could see how things might work out that way. “They laugh at Random,” I assured her.

“I don't see anything funny in
that,
” she assured me.

“I didn't think it was anything riotous myself,” I had to admit. “I just thought it was better than sitting around looking at one another. After all, I'm not Zero Mostel.”

“I wish you were,” she told me.

“I wish you were Dorothy Loudon myself,” I told her resignedly, “but there are people in hell who'd like ice-water too.”

Bovine was chomping lasagna as though cheese were going out of style. If there was going to be any further conversation I'd have to make it. I'd finally placed him as a distributor of well-packaged precepts whom a friend of mine had once described as “too timid to damn and too stingy to applaud.” But all that had been before my time.

“Have you seen any plays here?” he asked me. There was a dab of lasagna on his chin.

“I saw one about a fellow in jail,” I recalled, “that reminded me of a fellow named Hinkle, who was once doing time in the machine shop at Jefferson City. He began eating bolts, nuts and washers with the notion that if he got enough metal inside himself he'd get sent to the dispensary. He got so much junk inside him that you could hear him tinkle when he walked, so the other cons called him Hinkletinkle. When they put him under the X-ray there was so much metal inside him they had to operate and the operation was a success.”

“What is the point?” the lady inquired.

“Why, the operation was a success because the warden said ‘We're transferring Hinkletinkle to the mental ward—‘mental,' not ‘metal,' and I thought that was pretty good for a warden. Though I admit,” I added
hurriedly, “it isn't nearly as comical as the time when Judge J. Daniel Dingding tried a kid for getting out the hook-and-ladder on a false alarm.”

“I'm doing a
critique
on Hemingway for
Commentary,
” Bovine let me know. “Where are the
great
writers?”

“I read your papers on the Failure of Steinbeck, the Failure of Faulkner, the Failure of Fitzgerald, the Failure of Wolfe, and the Success of Irving Shulman,” I filled him in. “I can hardly wait to read this one.”

“All the great ones are gone,” he mourned.

Somebody had put an oyster stew in front of me.

“There was this Chicago judge we called Dingding,” I continued, “because once, long before he was elected to the bench, he'd turned in a false fire-alarm and gotten the hook-and-ladder dashing about looking for something on fire; only there wasn't anythng on fire. They couldn't do anything much about it except put him on probation and keep him away from matches because he was under-age. Dingding promised never to pull another firebox, and was so true to his word they made him a judge; and he has kept his word to this very day. To this day, if Dingding says he'll dismiss a case for five hundred dollars, he'll
dismiss
it.”

“Your stew is getting cold,” the lady told me.

“Wait till I finish the story,” I promised her. “You'll howl. Because even though His Honor doesn't pull fireboxes any more, he still thinks like a man who'd like to own his very own hook-and-ladder—you ought to have heard him holler at this kid accused of setting fire to a school. ‘We have to keep Chicago strong and America mighty! Bury this terrorist! Hard labor! No parole! Take him away!' But the kid jumped up and hollered as loud as Dingding, ‘Your Honor! This case has been fixed'—and his lawyer jumped up and knocked the kid down right there in court!

“‘
What
did he say?' Dingding asked the kid's lawyer.

“‘Your Honor, he said ‘I'm only a kid from the sticks,' the lawyer answered as quick as that. Dingding looked at his bailiff and the bailiff gave Dingding a wink.

“‘In view of the defendant's extreme youth and it being a first offense we recommend mercy and suspend sentence until after lunch,' Dingding announced, ‘go and sin no more.'”

“There's nothing funny in that either,” the lady felt.

“But that isn't the end of the story,” I explained to her, “because when
the lawyer took this kid home and told his father what the kid had jumped up and said, the father knocked the kid down too.”

“So?” she asked.

“So that same evening the bailiff dropped by and talked to the boy more like a father than the boy's own father.

“‘I feel so bitter about being knocked down in public,' the boy told the bailiff.

“‘Well,' the bailiff told him, ‘we're in private now'—and knocked the kid down
again!
”

“Are you making this up as you go along?” she wanted to know.

“Well, Dingding came in later, wanting to know what the bailiff thought he was trying to get away with fixing a case behind his back, and the bailiff said he'd been afraid to mention it because he was afraid Dingding would be furious at the idea of fixing a case. ‘I don't blame you,' Dingding acknowledged, ‘I like a good thief—but a man who'd pull a fire-alarm in cold passion'—and he swung around and hit that poor kid so hard the kid went out cold right there on his own parlor floor.”

“What
is
the point?” the lady demanded to know.

I looked at the last lonesome oyster in my stewless, drained and drying bowl. And the oyster looked back up as baffled as myself.

“The point is that, when it came
his
turn, Dingding hit the kid harder than anybody,” I explained.

“What did you think of the play you saw?” Bovine asked.

“It was by an Irishman who'd spent eight years in an English prison,” I recalled—“It was about Capital Punishment.”

“O, this killing, killing, killing,” Bovine grieved, “O Castro! Enough violence! Enough killing!”

“I just can't see how
anyone
can object to capital punishment for traitors,” the lady sailed in.

“They used to hang eleven-year-olds for sheepstealing,” I remembered reading, “but it didn't put a stop to sheepstealing.”

“I wasn't talking about
stealing,
” she corrected me, “I was talking about
treason.
”

“A person's habits are pretty well formed by the time he's old enough to be a spy,” I decided to go along with her, “now if they'd string up a couple of ten-year-olds for snitching as a preventive measure, it would put a
short quick stop to selling atomic secrets later. And there'd be more sheep for the rest of us. As it is there's hardly enough to go around.”

Conversation somehow slowed down after that, being mostly about whether Theodore Dreiser was a Great
Great
Writer or just a pretty good old sport. I maintained that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Then, having disposed of the filet, I took a toothpick and began trying to pry my gums loose.

“Put that
away!
” the lady commanded me.

I'd
thought
that would get her.

I went to work so furiously that a fragment of filet pirouetted off the toothpick and taxied in on Bovine's spumoni. The lady was halfway to the door before, half into his coat, Bovine caught up with her. I had just time to grab my skates and catch up with them both as they went through the door, wedging the three of us tightly for one moment. Then the wedge broke, they fled into a waiting cab and wheeled off trailing a scent of finkified cheese.

A light snow was falling. I stood alone but for my toothpick and skates. Somewhere down on Sixth Avenue a siren wailed.

Making me wonder whether Dingding's disappointment wasn't the same as that of any critic, or critic's mistress, for whom all triumphant hook-and-ladders fade.

Until nothing is left along cold streets where nothing can ever catch fire again.

I understood why the critic preferred dead writers to living ones.

The blood on my shirt is not my own. It never worked for me. It was last employed by Manning. If he wants it back all he has to do is to wring out the shirt.

Manning won't be wringing anything out of anything until the swelling below his left eye subsides. Has anyone informed you that Communications Officers have
very
fast hands?

Traveler! You too can be the only man aboard sporting a Kowloon Shiner! A fast bust in the face, delivered with all the elements of total surprise, can be yours without provocation. Southeast Asia has the action because everybody coagulates faster there. Even children coagulate. Anything goes in a free-trade port.