Ironweed - William Kennedy [11]
When the bus stopped at the corner of Broadway and Columbia Street, the corner where that infamous trolley was caught between flaming bedsheets, Aldo Campione boarded. He was clad in a white flannel suit, white shirt, and white necktie, and his hair was slicked down with brilliantine. Francis knew instantly that this was not the white of innocence but of humility. The man had been of low birth, low estate, and committed a low crime that had earned him the lowliest of deaths in the dust. Over there on the other side they must’ve give him a new suit. And here he came down the aisle and stopped at the seats where Rudy and Francis sat. He reached out his hand in a gesture to Francis that was ambiguous. It might have been a simple Abruzzian greeting. Or was it a threat, or a warning? It might have been an offer of belated gratitude, or even a show of compassion for a man like Francis who had lived long (for him), suffered much, and was inching toward death. It might have been a gesture of grace, urging, or even welcoming Francis into the next. And at this thought, Francis, who had raised his hand to meet Aldo’s, withdrew it.
“I ain’t shakin’ hands with no dead horse thief,” he said.
“I ain’t no horse thief,” Rudy said.
“Well you look like one,” Francis said.
By then the bus was at Madison Avenue and Broadway, and Rudy and Francis stepped out into the frosty darkness of six o’clock on, the final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.
o o o
In the dust and sand of a grassless vacant lot beside the Mission of Holy Redemption, a human form lay prostrate under a lighted mission window. The sprawl of the figure arrested Francis’s movement when he and Rudy saw it. Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead. This one belonged to a woman who seemed to be doing the dead man’s float in the dust: face down, arms forward, legs spread.
“Hey,” Rudy said as they stopped. “That’s Sandra.”
“Sandra who?” said Francis.
“Sandra There-ain’t-no-more. She’s only got one name, like Helen. She’s an Eskimo.”
“You dizzy bastard. Everybody’s an Eskimo or a Cherokee.”
“No, that’s the straight poop. She used to work up in Alaska when they were buildin’ roads.”
“She dead?”
Rudy bent down, picked up Sandra’s hand and held it. Sandra pulled it away from him.
“No,” Rudy said, “she ain’t dead.”
“Then you better get up outa there, Sandra,” Francis said, “or the dogs’ll eat your ass off.”
Sandra didn’t move. Her hair streamed out of her inertness, long, yellow-white wisps floating in the dust, her faded and filthy cotton housedress twisted above the back of her knees, revealing stockings so full of holes and runs that they had lost their integrity as stockings. Over her dress she wore two sweaters, both stained and tattered. She lacked a left shoe. Rudy bent over and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hey Sandra, it’s me, Rudy. You know me?”
“Hnnn,” said Sandra.
“You all right? You sick or anything, or just drunk?”
“Dnnn,” said Sandra.
“She’s just drunk,” Rudy said, standing up. “She can’t hold it no more. She falls over.”
“She’ll freeze there and the dogs’ll come along and eat her ass off,” Francis said.
“What dogs?” Rudy asked.
“The dogs, the dogs. Ain’t you seen them?”
“I don’t see too many dogs. I like cats. I see a lotta cats.