Ironweed - William Kennedy [33]
“I don’t know that man in back,” Helen said.
“Yeah you do,” said Francis. “That’s Little Red from the mission. He won’t bother you. If he does I’ll pull out his tongue.”
“I don’t want to get in there, Francis.”
“It’s warm, anyhow. Cold in them weeds, honey, awful cold. You walk the streets alone, they’ll pinch you quicker’n hell.”
“You get in the back.”
“No. No room in there for the likes of me. Legs’re too long.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll find me some of them tall weeds, get outa the wind.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Sure, I’ll be back. You get a good sleep and I’ll see you here or up at the mission in the ayem.”
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“You got to, babe. It’s what there is.”
Francis opened the passenger door and shook Finny.
“Hey bum. Move over. You got a visitor.”
Finny opened his eyes, heavy with wine. Little Red was snoring.
“Who the hell are you?” Finny said.
“It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in.”
“Francis.” Finny raised his head.
“I’ll get you a jug tomorrow for this, old buddy,” Francis said. “She’s gotta get in outa this weather.”
“Yeah,” said Finny.
“Never mind yeah, just move your ass over and let her sit. She can’t sleep behind that wheel, condition her stomach’s in.”
“Unnngghh,” said Finny, and he slid behind the wheel.
Helen sat on the front seat, dangling her legs out of the car. Francis stroked her cheek with three fingertips and then let his hand fall. She lifted her legs inside.
“You don’t have to be scared,” Francis said.
“I’m not scared,” Helen said. “Not that.”
“Finny won’t let nothin’ happen to you. I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he does.”
“She knows,” Finny said. “She’s been here before.”
“Sure,” said Francis. “Nothing can happen to you.”
“No.”
“See you in the mornin’.”
“Sure.”
“Keep the faith,” Francis said.
And he closed the car door.
o o o
He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more. Because he needed to confront the ragman in the morning, he would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?
He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square, where as a child he’d boarded the riverboats for outings to Troy, or Kingston, or picnics on Lagoon Island. He passed the D & H building and Billy Barnes’s Albany Evening Journal, a building his simpleminded brother Tommy had helped build in 1913. He walked up to Maiden Lane and Broadway, where Keeler’s Hotel used to be, and where his brother Peter sometimes spent the night when he was on the outs with Mama. But Keeler’s burned the year after Francis ran away and now it was a bunch of stores. Francis had rowed down Broadway to the hotel, Billy in the rowboat with him, in 1913 when the river rose away the hell and gone up and flooded half of downtown. The kid loved it. Said he liked it better’n sleigh ridin’. Gone. What the hell ain’t gone? Well, me. Yeah, me. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of me left, but I ain’t gone entirely. Be goddiddley-damned if I’m gonna roll over and die.
Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.
He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin