The Man Who Was Left Behind (5 page)

The first personal question they asked him came from Elmie, who said, “In trouble with the law?” He shook his head. Later he wondered if they had known about his being in jail that noon for looking at the house. They knew a lot of things but never gave any explanations.

A few days later he was standing on the post office steps. A lot of other men, some tramps and some just passing the time, were hanging around leaning against the wall, some
sitting on the steps. Spats was in the crowd but had not seen Mr. Mackenzie, or so he imagined. Two policemen walked by and moved a couple of the men, pointing to a sign that said No Loitering. One of the police took hold of an old man whom Mackenzie recognized as being the younger brother of the man who used to work as his father’s gardener. At the same time he gave Mr. Mackenzie a push, saying, “Out of the way.”

“Leave him alone,” he said. He said it in a terrible voice at first not comprehended as his own. Then he was taken by the arm and the voice came out of him again, saying, “Go away, leave me alone. Can’t you find any expired parking meters?” He must have been drunk that day. And then a second policeman came running up the steps, looked in his face, and said, “Why, Mr. Mackenzie, what on earth?” And then he began asking him if he was all right, was he all right, and he said, “I’m fine, just leave me alone,” blundering down the steps and away into the street.

He wondered afterwards how much that incident had told against him; the three might have thought he was on friendly terms with the law. But apparently Jumbo had not taken it seriously. For they accepted him and he discovered that he could tolerate being with them for hours or days at a stretch, whereas he could not bear to be long in the immediate company of anyone else.

Sometimes, in the warm weather and when it was dry, they used to sleep out in the open. They got drunk together and slept rough by the railroad sidings, cooking soup in a tin pot. One day Bessie told him that she had found a bug—a
bug,
Mr. Mackenzie—when she’d changed his sheets that morning. He went up the stairs, pulled back the covers on the bed, and looked. He thought he saw something and slapped his hand down over it, but there was nothing there when he took it away. He had begun to see spots lately.

What he liked most about them was their sense of time.
He assumed that Spats had joined the group comparatively recently, say two years before, and that Elmie and Jumbo had known each other for a long while, perhaps fifteen years or more. But the assumption might have been false. It was hard to tell. They gave him patchy information about themselves when they felt like it, and he talked or did not talk about himself, just as it came to him, not feeling either curious or anxious to tell.

His hair began to grow long, and his beard. Twice he had cut the hair himself. He did not like going to the barber’s because they talked so much even in the parts of town where he would not be recognized, and besides he needed to have the sense that he could get out whenever he wanted to. You wouldn’t be able to feel that in the chair, with all those towels around your neck; it would make a fuss if you had to stand up and leave. In the bars they made you pay as soon as they handed you the drink. That way you could go whenever you wanted to, just run out the door without having people rush after you calling, “Where are you going?”

They took their time. It wasn’t until a week after he had first talked and drunk with them that Spats said, “Thought you say you didn’t smoke.”

Mr. Mackenzie said, “The doctor told me to give it up.”

“Doctors,” said Spats. “Don’t tell me about doctors. Doctors and undertakers, don’t I know.”

And it must have been three weeks after that that Spats explained: “Tell me about doctors, I know. Here’s Spats, married man, and she going to have a child. Very unusual case say the doctor. Care and attention, difficult birth, all that. And it come time for the child to be born, doctor says congratulations, Spats, I been making medical history with this very unusual operation, but sorry—mother and child is dead and you owe us nine hundred and eighty-fi’ dollars. He says. Then the undertaker send his snaky friend, don’t
I want the best money can buy for the dearly departed and sure, I just say I’ll take that one, how do I know? I just know she dead. Deepest sympathy in your tragic hour, Spats, and you owe us thirteen hundred. My, yes—get it off my bones in twenty years. Melt them down and sell it. Wonder how much would they get.”

“When was that?” said Elmie.

“What?”

“When you was married.”

“Oh. That was nineteen thirty … one. That was.”

And one day Spats asked Elmie, “You hear from Blue Siddy?”

Elmie said, “I heard he died. Last year in Louisville, but I don’t know.” That was the way they thought of time. Maybe in ten years Elmie would be in Louisville and then he’d find out if Blue Siddy was dead or alive.

At some time Mr. Mackenzie had heard or read that the main topics of conversation among hobos were war and politics. The main topics of conversation among these three were guided by Jumbo, who evidently did not interest himself in the subject of war. In fact the only time any war came up was when Spats said that he’d been in the quartermaster corps in the First World War and got all the way to Paris. My war, thought Mr. Mackenzie, but didn’t say anything. As for current affairs, the matter of Cuba was raised only once and then dropped, nor did they tax him on the question of racial harmony except once, when it came to light that Mr. Mackenzie was or had been a lawyer, and Elmie wanted to know, “You ever defend any coloured folks?”

“Some,” he answered.

“For murder?”

“No, divorce, that kind of thing,” he said and the subject changed. He remembered Mrs. Bean’s divorce which never took place, how hard he had worked on it and how he got
into trouble at the firm because he’d overspent the allowance set aside for charity cases. Then after her husband got out of jail he ran off with a fourth woman and she wanted the divorce in order to marry a different, a third, man.

They talked a lot about money, once asking him directly, “You got money?”

“Some, but the bank doesn’t like giving it to me.” That was true. Every time he walked in there now their faces said: now it’s here it’s ours, and we don’t want you taking our money out—you shouldn’t be trusted with it.

Once he considered giving them something. Not bequeathing anything, because they were older than he was. He asked them seriously what they would do with a lot of money, not a million dollars but, say, thirty thousand apiece. They didn’t quite know. They could only really talk with deep feeling about other people’s money.

But money was a secondary topic of conversation. The main topics came from the newspapers which Jumbo read out loud, holding the papers authoritatively in his great flipper hands with their delicate long fingers. He’d once played the piano in a speakeasy. Also, if he could be believed, he’d been affiliated with the Wobblies and been witness to the assassination of Huey Long.

“Listen here,” he’d say, and read out the items for the day, which were all of the same nature and fell into the category termed by insurance companies “Acts of God”. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, avalanches, landslides, cave-ins, and similar occurrences were Jumbo’s delight. During the hurricane season he could hardly wait for the editions to come out on the streets. Then a mining disaster in West Virginia had them all in deep discussion for four days while the men were being dug out and their families listened for tappings within the rock. Mr. Mackenzie wondered if Jumbo had read about the nightclub fire in Mexico. Yes, of course he would have, naturally, opening
up the paper and saying, “My, listen here, Elmie, it says here …” He thought Jumbo would have made an outstanding newspaper correspondent, in fact he was one, since he interpolated his comments into the text as he went along.

They fell in with each other so easily, but when he thought about it he was still surprised that they had taken to him. Jumbo entertained deep suspicions towards other people, even other tramps passing through or sleeping rough out by the railroad yards. He would not mix with them, nor with the local jobless men who could be found in the big parks or outside the post office. Once they passed a blind guitar player and Mr. Mackenzie, being reminded of the guitars in Mexico, asked, “Who’s that?”

“That’s Sam.”

“Must be bad to be blind,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

And Elmie laughed with his soft musical laugh and Jumbo with his short, deep bark said, “Oh sure enough, you know how much that Sam take in every day? Thirty bucks at least,” and he went on to describe Sam’s method of collecting: standing outside the big restaurants at lunchtime and outside the churches on Sundays, his fattest collecting day. “Sa’day night it’s goodbye dark glasses, goodbye raggedy clothes, and there’s Sam in a pinstripe suit with a rosebud, one whore on the right arm and one on the left and down to the crap game at Sally Anne’s all night long, poor Sam. It’s a hard life for some of these guitar players.” Mr. Mackenzie couldn’t decide how much of the description was true. Jumbo might have said it simply because he didn’t like the man’s style of working.

When talking about other people’s money, Jumbo was willing to forgive a millionaire a lot if he did things with style. His own method of making money had a style of its own if you knew the principles behind it. Mr. Mackenzie had been wondering where they got the money to buy liquor and food and newspapers and sometimes cigarettes.
Then one day Jumbo outlined his handout system. He had other systems, too, much more complicated and refined and involving talking to people and trying to interest them in a variety of nonexistent schemes, but that was the one for the immediate amassing of small sums of money to see you through. First rule, go for a courting couple and ask the man for money. He’ll want to impress the girl and she will want to think he’s kind-hearted. Second rule, don’t ask the married man, because the wife won’t want to see him spend what she considers is money for her use, and the husband will look at you and think at least you got your freedom and you’re standing up all right so there’s no reason why you can’t work steady like him, and he won’t feel sorry for you. Third rule, learn to spot happy families.

“What do you mean, a happy family?” Mr. Mackenzie said.

Jumbo explained, “Happy families is where the woman wants to get you away from her children fast as she can and the man don’t want them to see him turn his face from a poor man. Happy families pays the best next to turtledoves.”

One day a stranger came into the park while Jumbo was reading the papers. He sat down and stayed there, another white man. He fidgeted with his own newspaper for a time, lit a cigarette, and said, “Nice day”, to all of them. “Half dead with loneliness” was Mr. Mackenzie’s diagnosis. No one answered him. But he was drunk as well as lonely. Mr. Mackenzie looked at the caved-in hat, the hole in the shoe, the tear at the shoulder, the bloodshot eyes. But he’s been to a barber, he thought, he still cares.

“Have a drink?” the man said, pulling a bottle from his coat pocket. They passed it around and Spats held on to it.

The man said, “My name’s Homer Conway, bankrupt in the hardware business,” and he smiled. “What’s your name, friend?” he asked Mr. Mackenzie, who was counting how
many errors the man had committed: making the first move, volunteering his name, telling about his past, giving information as to why he was where he was, asking names. He didn’t answer.

“Oh c’mon, let’s be friendly,” he pleaded.

Elmie, in his light, chuckly voice, told off their names, “Elmie, Jumbo, Spats, Lucky Mackenzie.” He heard it clearly for the first time. Before that he’d supposed it to be a mumbling of some other word or expression but now he knew that they’d been calling him “Lucky” for the past six weeks. He wondered why and then remembered the first day when he’d brought the cigarettes and it had been a pack of Lucky Strikes.

“Let me have another shot at that too, pal, huh?” the stranger said and reached out his hand for his bottle. He began to tell all of them his life story and they listened gloomily.

“Anybody got a coffin nail?” he asked, looking at Mr. Mackenzie, who was smoking. He threw over his pack of cigarettes. “Thanks, thanks a lot, Lucky,” he said, and hastened to return them after he had lit one. Mr. Mackenzie thought: Homer, you’re in for a rough time.

Later that day when he came back from the library, the three were sitting in the park by themselves.

“Where’s the puppydog?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“Homer Conway.”

“Him,” Jumbo said. “He didn’t belong.”

He wondered how they’d done it. Frozen him out by staring and not answering any questions, or by the direct approach: get the hell out of here, white man, this place belongs to us.

“How do you know?”

“All over him like chicken pox, hello my lifelong friend, thank you this thank you that, can I have my bottle back?
He won’t be around no more. You see what he done when he got the bottle? Wiped it with his hand.”

“Just a reflex action, habit,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

“What I say. You got all them reflex habits, you don’t belong.”

“I think maybe he wanted to be saved.”

“Crying for it,” Jumbo said, and opened the paper to a very satisfactory account of a flash flood.

That was in the summer. Now it was the beginning of November, and when Jumbo finished reading the paper they tore it into sections and put them inside their clothes to keep out the cold. They were thinking of hitting the road again, perhaps going to Florida, although they hadn’t yet decided exactly where. They asked him if he was coming. He said he couldn’t tell, he’d have to think it over, he didn’t think he could make it but he’d tell them for sure later in the day.

The broken-windmill leaves of the tree bent back and flopped against the wall and he thought he’d have a drink. Or two, or maybe three, because the cigarettes and the coughing made his throat dry.

He had his first drink in a bar where there were travel posters on the wall. One of them showed tall palm trees and sea of a colour—he didn’t know how they ever managed to get that colour on to paper, it was so lovely. Didn’t look like the sea he knew, the treacherous sea full of biting creatures and mines and colder than the grave. Painted or printed by somebody who’d only seen it from the shore. That was the way to look at it, from the shore.