Ironweed - William Kennedy [24]
“I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.
“You know her last name?”
“No. Never heard it.”
“Don’t make much difference now.”
“Never did,” Pee Wee said.
o o o
Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.
Aldo Campione, walking on the opposite side of North Pearl from Francis and Helen, raised his right hand in the same ambiguous gesture Francis had witnessed at the bar. As Francis speculated on the meaning, the man who had been sitting with Aldo stepped out of the shadows into a streetlight’s glow, and Aldo’s gesture then became clear: it introduced Francis to Dick Doolan, the bum who tried to cut off Francis’s feet with a meat cleaver.
“I went to the kid’s grave today,” Francis said.
“What kid?”
“Gerald.”
“Oh, you did?” she said. “Then that was the first time, wasn’t it? It must’ve been.”
“Right.”
“You’re thinking about him these days. You mentioned him last week.”
“I never stop thinkin’ about him.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel of this city, city once his, city lost. The commerce along with its walls jarred him: so much new, stores gone out of business he never even heard of. Some things remained: Whitney’s, Myers’, the old First Church, which rose over Clinton Square, the Pruyn Library. As he walked, the cobblestones turned to granite, houses became stores, life aged, died, renewed itself, and a vision of what had been and what might have been intersected in an eye that could not really remember one or interpret the other. What would you give never to have left, Francis?
“I said, what’s got into you?”
“Nothin’s got into me. I’m just thinkin’ about a bunch of stuff. This old street. I used to own this street, once upon a time.”
“You should’ve sold it when you had the chance.”
“Money. I ain’t talkin’ about money.”
“I didn’t think you were. That was a funny.”
“Wasn’t much funny. I said I saw Gerald’s grave. I talked to him.”
“Talked? How did you talk?”
“Stood and talked to the damn grass. Maybe I’m gettin’ nutsy as Rudy. He can’t hold his pants up, they fall over his shoes.”
“You’re not nutsy, Francis. It’s because you’re here. We shouldn’t be here. We should go someplace else.”
“Right. That’s where we oughta go. Else.”
“Don’t drink any more tonight.”
“Listen here. Don’t you nag my ass.”
“I want you straight, please. I want you straight.”
“I’m the straightest thing you’ll see all week. I am so straight. I’m the straightest thing you’ll sweek. The thing that happened on the other side of the street. The thing that happened was Billy told me stuff about Annie. I never told you that. Billy told me stuff about Annie, how she never told I dropped him.”
“Never told who, the police?”
“Never nobody. Never a damn soul. Not Billy, not Peg, not her brother, not her sisters. Ain’t that the somethin’est thing you ever heard? I can’t see a woman goin’ through that stuff and not tellin’ nobody about it.”
“You’ve got a lot to say about those people.”
“Not much to say.”
“Maybe you ought to go see them.”
“No, that wouldn’t do no good.”
“You’d get it out of your system.”
“What out of my system?”
“Whatever it is that’s in there.”
“Never mind about my system. How come you wouldn’t stay at the mission when you got an invite?”
“I don’t want their charity.”
“You ate their soup.”
“I did not. All I had was coffee. Anyway, I don’t like Chester. He doesn