The Collected Stories (16 page)

In the end, man will probably peel his skin (said Eddie) to favor durable plastics, at which time, kaput the race problem. A man will be any color he chooses or translucent too, if the shape and hue of intestines can be made fashionable. Eddie had lots of advance information which did not turn a hair of his head, for he talked of the ineluctable future; but all his buddies, square or queer, clever and sentimental, pricked their ears in tears.

He also warned them of the spies who peeked from windows or plopped like stones on the street, which was the kids' by all unentailed rights. Mrs. Goredinsky, head spy the consistency of fresh putty, sat on an orange crate every morning, her eye on the door of 1434. Also Mrs. Green, Republican poll watcher in November—the rest of the year she waited in her off-the-street doorway, her hand trembling, her head turning one way, then the other.

“Tennis, anyone?” asked Carl Clop, the super's son.

“Let her live,” said Eddie, marking time.

Then one day old Clop, the super, rose from the cellar, scrambling the kids before him with the clatter of bottle tops. He took a stance five steps below Eddie, leaned on his broom, and prepared to make conversation.

“What's the matter, son?” he asked. “Where's your pals?”

“Under the kitchen table,” said Eddie. “They got juiced on apricot nectar.”

“Go on, Eddie; you got an in. Who's the bum leaves Kleenex in the halls?”

“I don't know. Goredinsky has a cold for months.”

“Aah, her, what you got against her, a old pot of cabbage soup? You always make a remark on her.”

Out of a dark window in second-floor-front a tiny voice sang to the tune of “My Country. ‘Tis of Thee”:

“Get a load of that, Clop,” said Eddie. “Nobody has any privacy around here, you notice? Listen to me, Clop, in the country in superbia, every sonofabitch has a garage to tinker in. On account of that, great ideas, brilliant inventions come from out of town. Why the hell shouldn't we produce as fine minds as anybody else?”

Now Eddie was just helping Clop out, talkwise, maintaining relations with authority, so to speak. He would have ended the conversation right then and there, since at that moment he was in the mental act of inventing a cockroach segregator, a device which would kill only that cockroach which emigrated out of its pitchy crack into the corn flakes of people. If properly conceived and delicately contrived, all the other cockroaches would be left alone to gum up the laths and multiply and finally inherit the entire congressional district. Why not?

“Not so dumb,” said Mr. Clop. “Privacy.” Then he let Eddie have a bewhiskered, dead-eye, sideways leer. “What you need privacy for, you? To stick it into girls?”

No reply.

Clop retrieved the conversation. “So that's how it goes, that's how they get ahead of us, the farmers. What do you know? How come someone don't figure it out, to educate you kids up a little, especially in summer? The city's the one pays the most taxes. Anyway, what the hell you do on the stoop all day? How come Carl hangs out in front of Michailovitch, morning noon night, every time I look up? Come on, get the hell off the stoop here, you Teitelbaum,” he yelled. “Stupids. Stick the Kleenex in your pocket.” He gave Eddie a splintery whisk with the broom. He turned away, frowning, thinking. “Go ‘way, bums,” he mumbled at two loitering infants, maybe four years old.

Nevertheless, Clop was a man of grave instinct, a serious man. Three days later he offered Eddie the key to the bicycle and carriage room of 1436, the corner and strategic building.

“For thinking up inventions,” said Clop. “What are we, animals?” He went on to tell that he was proud to be associated with scientific research. So many boys were out bumming, on the tramp, tramp, tramp. Carl, his own son, looked bad, played poker day and night under the stairs with Shmul, the rabbi's son, a Yankee in a skullcap.
*
Therefore, Clop begged Eddie to persuade Carl to do a little something in his line of thinking and follow-through. He really liked science very much, Mr. Clop said, but needed a little encouragement, since he had no mother.

“O.K., O.K.” Eddie was willing. “He can help me figure out a rocket to the moon.”

“The moon?” Mr. Clop asked. He peeked out the cellar window at a piece of noonday sky.

Right before Eddie's mirage-making eyes for his immediate use was a sink, electricity, gas outlets, and assorted plumbing pipes. What else is basic to any laboratory? Do you think that the Institute for Advanced Study started out any stronger than that, or all the little padlocked cyclotron houses? The beginning of everything is damp and small, but wide-armed oaks—according to myth, legend, and the folktales of the people—from solitary acorns grow.

Eddie's first chore was the perfection of the cockroach segregator. At cost plus 6 percent, he trailed some low-voltage wire all around local kitchen baseboards, which immediately returned to its gummy environment under the linoleum the cockroach which could take a hint. It electrocuted the stubborn fools not meant by Darwin anyway to survive.

There was nothing particularly original in this work. Eddie would be the first to concede that he had been thinking about the country and cows all summer, as well as barbed wire, and had simply applied recollected knowledge to the peculiar conditions of his environment.

“What a hell of a summer this is turning into,” said Carl, plucking a bug off the lab's wire. “I mean, we ought to have some fun too, Eddie. How about it? I mean, if we were a club, we would be more well rounded.”

“Everyone wants fun,” said Eddie.

“I don't mean real fun,” said Carl. “We could be a science club. But just you and me— No, I'm sick of that crap. Get some more guys in. Make it an organization, Eddie.”

“Why not?” said Eddie, anxious to get to work.

“Great. I've been thinking of some names. How's … Advanseers … Get it?”

“Stinks.”

“I thought of a funny one … like on those little cards. How about The Thimkers?”

“Very funny.”

Carl didn't press it. “All right. But we have to get some more members.”

“Two,” said Eddie, thinking a short laugh.

“Well, O.K. But, Eddie, what about girls? I mean, after all, women have the vote a long time. They're doctors and … What about Madame Curie? There's others.”

“Please, Carl, lay off. We got about thirteen miles of wire left. I got to figure out something.”

Carl couldn't stop. He liked girls all around him, he said. They made him a sunny, cheerful guy. He could think of wonderful witticisms when they were present. Especially Rita Niskov and Stella Rosenzweig.

He would like to go on, describing, as an example, the Spitz twins, how they were so top-heavy but with hips like boys. Hadn't Eddie seen them afloat at the Seymour Street Pool, water-winged by their airtight tits?

Also darling little Stella Rosenzweig, like a Vassar girl despite being only in third-term high. When you danced with her, you could feel something like pinpricks, because although she was little she was extremely pointed.

Eddie was absolutely flipped by a groundswell of lust just before lunch. To save himself, he coldly said, “No, no. No girls. Saturday nights they can come over for a little dancing, a little petting. Fix up the place. No girls in the middle of the week.”

He promised, however, to maintain an open line between Carl and the Spitz twins by recruiting for immediate membership their brother Arnold. That was a lucky, quiet choice. Arnold needed a corner in which to paint. He stated that daylight would eventually disappear and with it the myths about north light. He founded in that dark cellar a school of painters called the Light Breakers, who still work together in a loft on East Twenty-ninth Street under two 25-watt bulbs.

On Carl's recommendation Shmul Klein was ingathered, a great fourth hand, but Eddie said no card tables. Shmul had the face of an unentrammeled guy. Did he make book after school? No, no, he said, rumors multiplied: the truth was single.

He was a journalist of life, as Eddie was a journeyman in knowledge. When questioned about his future, he would guess that he was destined to trip over grants, carrying a fearsome load of scholarships on his way to a soft job in advertising, using a fraction of his potential.

Well, there were others, of course, who glinted around, seeking membership under the impression that a neighborhood cat-house was being established. Eddie laughed and pointed to a market glutted by individual initiative, not to mention the way the bottom has fallen out of the virgin as moral counterweight.

It took time out of Eddie to be a club. Whole afternoons and weekends were lost for public reasons. The boys asked him to hold open meetings so that the club's actual disposition would be appreciated by the parents of girls. Eddie talked then on “The Dispersal of the Galaxies and the Conservation of Matter.” Carl applauded twice, in an anarchy of enthusiasm. Mr. Clop listened, was impressed, asked what he could do for them, and then tied their wattage into Mrs. Goredinsky's meter.

Eddie offered political lectures, too, as these are times which, if man were human, could titillate his soul. From the four-by-six room which Eddie shared with Itzik Halbfunt, his father's monkey, he saw configurations of disaster revise the sky before anyone even smelled smoke.

“Who was the enemy?” he asked, to needle a little historicity into his clubmates. “Was it the People of the Sea? Troy? Rome? The Saracens? The Huns? The Russians? The colonies in Africa, the stinking proletariat? The hot owners of capital?”

Typically he did not answer. He let them weave these broad questions on poor pinheaded looms while he slipped into Michailovitch's for a celery tonic.

He shared his profits from the cockroach segregator with the others. This way they took an interest and were courteous enough to heed his philosophic approach, as did the clients to whom he pointed out a human duty to interfere with nature as little as possible except for food-getting (survival), a seminal tragedy which obtains in the wild forests as well.

Reading, thinking on matters beyond the scope of the physical and chemical sciences carried his work from the idealistic cockroach segregator to a telephone dial system for people on relief within a ten-block radius—and finally to the well-known War Attenuator, which activated all his novitiate lab assistants but featured his own lonely patience.

“Eddie, Eddie, you take too much time,” said his father. “What about us?”

“You,” said Eddie.

How could he forget his responsibilities at the Teitelbaum Zoo, a pet shop where three or four mutts, scabby with sawdust, slept in the window? A hundred gallons of goldfish were glassed inside, four canaries singing tu-wit-tu-wu—all waited for him to dump the seeds, the hash, the mash into their dinner buckets. Poor Itzik Halbfunt, the monkey from Paris. France, waited too, nibbling his beret. Itzik looked like Mr. Teitelbaum's uncle who had died of Jewishness in the epidemics of ‘40, ‘41. For this reason he would never be sold. “Too bad,” is an outsider's comment, as a certain local Italian would have paid maybe $45 for that monkey.

In sorrow Mr. Teitelbaum had turned away forever from his neighbor, man, and for life, then, he squinted like a cat and hopped like a bird and drooped like a dog. Like a parrot, all he could say and repeat when Eddie made his evening break was, “Eddie, don't leave the door open, me and the birds will fly away.”

“If you got wings. Papa, fly,” said Eddie. And that was Eddie's life for years and years, from childhood on: he shoveled dog shit and birdseed, watching the goldfish float and feed and die in a big glass of water far away from China.

One Monday morning in July, bright and hot and early, Eddie called the boys together for assignments in reconnaissance and mapping. Carl knew the basement extremely well, but Eddie wanted a special listing of doors and windows, their conditions established. There were three buildings involved in this series, 1432, 1434, 1436. He requested that they keep a diary in order to arrive at viable statistics on how many ladies used the laundry facilities at what hours, how hot the hot water generally was at certain specific times.

“Because we are going to work with gases now. Gas expands, compresses, diffuses, and may be liquefied. If there is any danger involved at any point, I will handle it and be responsible. Just don't act like damn fools. I promise you,” he added bitterly, “a lot of fun.”

He asked them to develop a little competence with tools. Carl as the son of Clop, plumber, electrician, and repairman, was a happy, aggressive teacher. In the noisy washing-machine hours of morning, under Carl's supervision, they drilled barely visible holes in the basement walls and pipe-fitted long-wear rubber tubes. The first series of tests required a network of delicate ducts.

“I am the vena cava and the aorta,” Eddie paraphrased. “Whatever goes from me must return to me. You be the engineers. Figure out the best way to nourish all outlying areas.”

By “nourish.” Shmul pointed out, he really meant “suffocate.”

On the twenty-ninth of July they were ready. At 8:13 a.m. the first small-scale, small-area test took place. At 8:12 a.m., just before the moment of pff,
*
all the business of the cellars was being transacted—garbage transferred from small cans into large ones; early wide-awake grandmas, rocky with insomnia, dumped wash into the big tubs: boys in swimming trunks rolled baby carriages out into the cool morning. A coal truck arrived, shifted, backed up across the sidewalk, stopped, shoved its black ramp into one sooty cellar window, and commenced to roar.

Mr. Clop's radio was loud. As he worked, rolling the cans, hoisting them with Carl's help up the wooden cellar steps, arguing with the coalmen about the right of way, he listened to the news. He wanted to know if the sun would roll out, flashy as ever; if there was a chance for rain, as his brother grew tomatoes in Jersey.