Ironweed - William Kennedy [58]
The woman looked at him with surprise, then terror, and retreated swiftly up her walkway and back into the house. Francis watched her with awe. Why, when he was sober, and wearing a new shirt, should he frighten a woman with a simple question? The door reopened and a shoeless bald man in an undershirt and trousers stood in the doorway.
“What did you ask my wife?” he said.
“I asked if she knew where I could get a turkey.”
“What for?”
“Well,” said Francis, and he paused, and scuffed one foot, “my duck died.”
“Just keep movin’, bud.”
“Gotcha,” Francis said, and he limped on.
He hailed a group of schoolboys crossing the street toward him and asked: “Hey fellas, you know a meat market around here?”
“Yeah, Jerry’s,” one said, “up at Broadway and Lawn.”
Francis saluted the boy as the others stared. When Francis started to walk they all turned and ran ahead of him. He walked past the house without looking at it, his gait improving a bit. He would have to walk two blocks to the market, then two blocks back. Maybe they’d have a turkey for sale. Settle for a chicken? No.
By the time he reached Lawn Avenue he was walking well, and by Broadway his gait, for him, was normal. The floor of Jerry’s meat market was bare wood, sprinkled with sawdust and extraordinarily clean. Shining white display cases with slanted and glimmering glass offered rows of splendid livers, kidneys, and bacon, provocative steaks and chops, and handsomely ground sausage and hamburg to Francis, the lone customer.
“Help you?” a white-aproned butcher asked. His hair was so black that his facial skin seemed bleached.
“Turkey,” Francis said. “I’d like me a nice dead turkey.”
“It’s the only kind we carry,” the butcher said. “Nice and dead. How big?”
“How big they come?”
“So big you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Gimme a try.”
“Twenty-five, twenty-eight pounds?”
“How much those big fellas sell for?”
“Depends on how much they weigh.”
“Right. How much a pound, then?”
“Forty-four cents.”
“Forty-four. Say forty.” He paused. “You got maybe a twelve-pounder?”
The butcher entered the white meat locker and came out with a turkey in each hand. He weighed one, then another.
“Ten pounds here, and this is twelve and a half.”
“Give us that big guy,” Francis said, and he put the five singles and change on the white counter as the butcher wrapped the turkey in waxy white paper. The butcher left him twenty-five cents change on the counter.
“How’s business, pal?” Francis asked.
“Slow. No money in the world.”
“They’s money. You just gotta go get it. Lookit that five bucks I just give ye. I got me that this afternoon.”
“If I go out to get money, who’ll mind the store?”
“Yeah,” said Francis, “I's’pose some guys just gotta sit and wait. But it’s a nice clean place you got to wait in.”
“Dirty butchers go out of business.”
“Keep the meat nice and clean, is what it is.”
“Right. Good advice for everybody. Enjoy your dead turkey.”
o o o
He walked down Broadway to King Brady’s saloon and then stared down toward the foot of North Street, toward Welt the Tin’s barn and the old lock, long gone, a daylight look at last. A few more houses stood on the street now, but it hadn’t changed so awful much. He’d looked briefly at it from the bus, and again last night in the barn, but despite the changes time had made, his eyes now saw only the vision of what had been so long ago; and he gazed down on reconstituted time: two men walking up toward Broadway, one of them looking not unlike himself at twenty-one. He understood the cast of the street’s incline as the young man stepped upward, and upward, and upward toward where Francis stood.
The turkey’s coldness penetrated his coat, chilling his arm and his side. He switched the package to his other arm and walked up North Third Street toward their house. They’ll figure I want ‘em to cook the turkey, he thought. Just tell ‘em: Here’s a turkey, cook it up of a Sunday.
Kids came toward him on bikes. Leaves covered the sidewalks of Walter Street. His leg began to ache, his feet again in the glue. Goddamn legs got a life of their own too. He turned the corner, saw the front stoop, walked past it. He turned at the driveway and stopped at the side door just before the garage. He stared at the dotted white curtain behind the door