Ironweed - William Kennedy [80]
“More’n one.”
“Accidental, was it?”
“No. I tried to get that one guy, Allen. He was takin’ my job.”
“That’s a good reason.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he was just doin’ what he had to do.”
“Baloney,” Old Shoes said. “That’s what everybody does, good, bad, and lousy. Burglars, murderers.”
And Francis fell quiet, sinking into yet another truth requiring handling.
o o o
The jungle was maybe seven years old, three years old, a month old, days old. It was an ashpit, a graveyard, and a fugitive city. It stood among wild sumac bushes and river foliage, all fallen dead now from the early frost. It was a haphazard upthrust of tarpaper shacks, lean-tos, and impromptu constructions describable by no known nomenclature. It was a city of essential transiency and would-be permanency, a resort of those for whom motion was either anathema or pointless or impossible. Cripples lived here, and natives of this town who had lost their homes, and people who had come here at journey’s end to accept whatever disaster was going to happen next. The jungle, a visual manifestation of the malaise of the age and the nation, covered the equivalent of two or more square city blocks between the tracks and the river, just east of the old carbarns and the empty building that once housed Iron Joe’s saloon.
Francis’s friend in the jungle was a man in his sixties named Andy, who had admitted to Francis in the boxcar in which they both traveled to Albany that people used to call him Andy Which One, a name that derived from his inability, until he was nearly twenty, to tell his left hand from his right, a challenge he still faced in certain stressful moments. Francis found Andy Which One instantly sympathetic, shared the wealth of cigarettes and food he was carrying, and thought instantly of him again when Annie handed him two turkey sandwiches and Peg slipped him a hefty slice of plum pudding, all three items wrapped in waxed paper and intact now in the pockets of his 1916 suitcoat.
But Francis had not seriously thought of sharing the food with Andy until Rudy had begun singing of the jungle. On top of that, Francis almost suffocated seeing his own early venom and self-destructive arrogance reembodied in Little Red, and the conjunction of events impelled him to quit the flop and seek out something he could value; for above all now, Francis needed to believe in simple solutions. And Andy Which One, a man confused by the names of his own hands, but who survived to dwell in the city of useless penitence and be grateful for it, seemed to Francis a creature worthy of scrutiny. Francis found him easily when Old Shoes parked the car on the dirt road that bordered the jungle. He roused Andy from shallow sleep in front of a fading fire, and handed him the whiskey bottle.
“Have a drink, pal. Lubricate your soul.”
“Hey, old Francis. How you makin’ out there, buddy?”
“Puttin’ one foot in front of the other and hopin’ they go somewheres,” Francis said. “The hotel open here? I brought a couple of bums along with me. Old Shoes here, he says he ain’t a bum no more, but that’s just what he says. And Rudy the Cootie, a good ol’ fella.”
“Hey,” said Andy, “just settle in. Musta known you was comin’. Fire’s still goin’, and the stars are out. Little chilly in this joint. Lemme turn up the heat.”
They all sat down around the fire while Andy stoked it with twigs and scraps of lumber, and soon the flames were trying to climb to those reaches of the sky that are the domain of all fire. The flames gave vivid life to the cold night, and the men warmed their hands by them.
A figure hovered behind Andy and when he felt its presence he turned and welcomed Michigan Mac to the primal scene.
“Glad to meet ya,” Francis said to Mac. “I heard you fell through a hole the other night.”
“Coulda broke my neck,” Mac said.
“Did you break it?” Francis asked.
“If I’da broke my neck I’d be dead.”
“Oh, so you’re livin’, is that it? You ain’t dead?”
“Who’s this guy?” Mac asked Andy.
“He’s an all-right guy I met on the train,” Andy said.
“We’re all all right,” Francis said.