The gypsys curse, p.11
The Gypsy's Curse, page 11
“What happened?” she said.
“He broke my arm,” Leroy said.
“Who?” she said.
“Him,” Leroy said.
“Did you do that?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “well ”
Aristotle Parsus stood in the door behind her. He was buckling his belt.
“What happened?” he said.
“Marvin broke the kid’s arm,” said Hester.
Aristotle Parsus looked at me. “You ought to get yourself one of those massages, Marvin, it’ll calm you down.”
Al had squatted down beside me. He hadn’t touched me but he was looking at the place on my neck where his fist caught me. I could barely swallow. It felt like my throat was swelling shut.
He kept looking at me, but he raised his hand behind him and said to Hester and Aristotle: “You’ll have to go. This is family.”
“Sure,” said Hester. “A family needs to settle things together.”
When they were gone, Al said: “Al’s sorry he hit you.”
“You couldn’t do anything else,” I said.
“It’s bad,” he said. “This is still bad.”
He looked like he wanted to touch me, but he didn’t. He raised his hand once as though to put it on my neck, then he rubbed his eyes instead.
“You better go put a cold poultice on that neck,” he said.
He stood up and went over to Leroy, who was sitting with the tears dried on his face, holding his right forearm tenderly in his left hand. Al took the arm in his fingers. Leroy’s whole body shook, and I could tell by his mouth that he made some sort of whimpering sound.
“How is it?” I said.
“Broke maybe,” said Al. “Maybe not. He better get it x-rayed. Tell Pete to bring the car around.”
When I went by the table, I stopped. Leroy was looking at me in a way I have never seen him look before, like a man might look at a favorite dog that had just bit him for no reason.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What’s he saying?” Leroy asked Al.
“I’m sorry,” said Al.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” I said.
Al said that.
“You didn’t mean to?” Leroy said. “Jesus, you didn’t mean to? How could you do that to my arm …” He held his arm up toward me. “… ’thout meaning to?”
“I … I …” I didn’t know what to say to him. “It was something else,” I said. “It wasn’t you. It was something else.”
Al said that.
Leroy leaned across the table and looked down at me. His blond eyebrows bunched over his nose and his chin went almost blue with concentration. “You let me tell you what I think, you goddam … goddam … I think you gone crazy. I think you lost you fucking mind. Reach for a goddam old bite of meat offen you plate and you break a feller’s fucking arm. That ain’t nothing but crazy.” Spit flew from his mouth with the words. He started crying and rocking with his arm hugged against his chest.
I said: “Tell Leroy that…’’
“Al’s telling you to get the car. You’ve said enough. None of it amounts to anything. Nothing. Find Pete and tell him to bring that car around. Now.”
Finally, because there was nothing to say that made any sense, I went out into the gym, where all the boxers and guys pumping steel stopped and stared at me, and down the stairs to the place on the sidewalk where I found Pete sitting on the empty crate he kept there. He had his cap pulled forward, taking the sun. I made the signal that meant to bring the car around but as soon as I touched him he pushed his cap up and turned his yellow eyes on me.
“To the horsepital?” he said.
I nodded my head.
“Did you do what Miss Hester say?”
I only stared back at him.
“Say you hurt Leroy. Say you squeezed him bad on his ahm.”
I nodded my head and looked down the street at the place under the lamppost where the Volvo should have been parked.
“She went on off,” said Pete. He stared at me and I could feel the blood rushing to my face, and I was humiliated. “Thas right,” he said. “She lef with him. Say she gone drop him by his boat, then she going to see her momma and daddy. An for me to tell you, say you be sure and tell that Marvin Molar that I be back. Ain’t no way I ain’t coming back, she say. Tell’m late this afternoon.”
I pointed for him to get the car and bring it around, but he just sat there looking at me. Then a slow soft smile touched his old nigger mouth, and I could have killed him. Anger, sharp as a knife, made my nerves sing like wires. I turned and raced up the stairs. I sat in a chair by the window on the street side of the gym and watched Al lead Leroy down to the curb where Pete had the car waiting. I just sat there for a long time, but I could feel the guys who were working out watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and finally I couldn’t stand that anymore, so I went back to the steam room, but it had about ten lifters in it sitting cheek to jowl sweating their enormous naked asses. Their huge heads swung in the steamy layers of air under the yellow light, water beading on their lashes as they squinted. I backed out the door and closed it.
The thought that she had gone off with Aristotle Parsus had stuck in my head. Every once in a while it seemed like I could actually see the words glowing across the back of my skull: Say she gone drop him by his boat.
I went down the hall to the kitchen and climbed up in my bed. I took down an Atlantic Monthly. But I couldn’t read it. Actually, I didn’t want to read it. I still wanted to do what I had done at the table with Leroy: hurt somebody or something. My jaw was aching from clenching my teeth. I stared at the blurred page of the magazine. She said she was taking him by his boat and then she said she was going to see her parents.
Well, why not believe it? I thought: Why not take her at her word and believe what she said and not sit here eating your liver making something else out of it? Going home for a visit to the dear ole momma and daddy she locked in a room for a week, right?
But that’s only what her daddy said. He said she locked them in a room. That doesn’t mean it happened. Why would a man say that about his own daughter if it wasn’t true? Who the hell can answer that? Why does anybody say anything they say?
I lay in the bed for a long time thumbing through one magazine after another. I even took down my favorite book in all the world, one I’ve read more times than I know, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, and tried to read in it. But it wasn’t any good. I didn’t want to read. I felt utterly violent and utterly helpless at the same time. The violence was aimed as much at myself as anything else because I could feel self-pity beginning to drain behind my eyes. And, goddam, is there anything I hate more than an asshole who goes sucking around, whimpering about how the world isn’t being fair? I told you before, fair is not a word I’ve ever been able to get much use out of.
So I lay in my bed and chewed my teeth until finally I got up and zipped into a thick terry-cloth workout suit and went out into the gym. Most of the guys who had been there when I hurt Leroy were gone by then. Others had come in, but the gym wasn’t crowded. One of the body-builders who had come in was Muscle. He worked out six days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday: upper body. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday: lower body. He was a freak, but he was one of the great freaks. I’d never liked who he was and never got along with him, but I liked what he was and had always admired him—if you can understand that.
I had put on my suit and gone out there to work out to get outside myself. One of the things I’ve found in my life is that in a tortured muscle there’s a kind of peace you can’t find anywhere else. Exhaustion drives out the world. I sat by my pile of bricks watching Muscle. When he works out, he wears two huge baggy sweatshirts and a pair of slouching sweatpants. He’ll isolate and work one muscle for an hour, then he’ll isolate and work another. He peeps at whatever muscle he’s working. He calls it spying on it. I watched him get off the prone-press bench, where he was doing flat-backed presses with four hundred pounds, and go over and spy at his throbbing swollen chest. One whole wall of the gym is nothing but mirrors because an iron freak can’t work out without a mirror. He was in front of the mirror looking down the neck of his sweatshirt. He was flexing and concentrating on his chest, looking down his sweatshirt which he was holding open at the neck with his rough, square-fingered hands. Then suddenly he stretched the neck of the sweatshirt all the way down and exposed one lobe of his chest to the mirror, where he stared at it, flexed, pumped, swelling with concentration. Abruptly he sacked the pectoral muscle down the neck of his shirt and went to the bench and dropped onto his back. He did a fast set of twelve repetitions, leapt up and stared at himself down the neck of his shirt, after which he went to the mirror and exposed the left lobe of his chest so he could concentrate on it.
I wasn’t the only one in the gym watching him. The other bodybuilders and even some of the boxers had paused and were quietly watching one of the great bodies in the country flex and stare at itself in the mirror.
I don’t know what it did for anybody else, but it helped me. It got me up for the workout, put a little fire in my blood, made me want to compete with myself, to get up on the rope and meet some pain and see if I could handle it. Because, finally, the thing about a real workout is that you know you’re going to meet pain, and the only question is how you’re going to be able to handle it.
Fuck it, I said to myself, I don’t care if she dropped him by the boat. I don’t care how the son of a Aristotle bitch got here to start with. Didn’t she tell Pete to say she was coming back? That’s enough for me. That’s more than enough.
I was stacking bricks like a goddam madman, racing up to seven bricks high, tearing them down, then stacking them all over. I knew that on the other side of the gym Russell Muscle was watching me. Without looking, I knew he’d stopped, the neck of his sweatshirt pulled open, but his head turned staring at my twenty-inch arms stacking and pumping.
See, it worked both ways with Muscle and me. It was like a sound and its echo. I bounced off him and he bounced off me. He got so goddam worked up sometimes when he saw me going through my routine that he just about killed himself pumping steel. And when I watched him working, it fired me up. And there we were on that hot Monday afternoon going one-on-one across the steamy gym.
As my mean swelling arms pumped bricks, the words shouted in my head: Hester, you fucking cunt, what are you compared to this?
I kept stacking, did one-arm stands, the finger routine, went up the rope, went up it upside down, swung into the rings, held iron crosses, ran the stairs, started over on the bricks. A high whistle started in my head. I didn’t listen to it.
Whistle, son of a bitch, whistle yourself blind!
The terry-cloth suit was soaked and it dripped a huge ragged stain of sweat on the floor under where I hung in the Roman rings. On the other side of the gym, Muscle was slamming himself through a workout: upright rowing, bent-over rowing, flying laterals, pull-overs, military presses, back to the prone. Finally he went to his lower body even though that was not his day for it, and ended up under a weight that bowed the Olympic bar when he took it off the squat rack.
I don’t know how long it went on. Gradually, I was aware that there were fewer and fewer other people in the gym as the lifters and boxers left. But Russell Muscle and I kept at it, working counterpoint to each other at opposite ends of the gym, lost in a sweaty, mindless world where only the next exercise was important.
At some point I remember Leroy and Pete and Al coming back, climbing the stairs, two gray faces and a black one, standing for a moment watching Muscle and me. They weren’t much more than a blur to me at the head of the stairs (I was doing two-finger stands) but I could see that Leroy carried his right arm against his chest wrapped in a white bandage. Leroy standing like that sent me into one last blind series of exercises that ended only when I looked up from a final press-out on the bricks to see Muscle, with his hand out. I sat down on the floor and reached up. We shook hands.
“That was a workout,” he said. His beautiful mouth gulped air like water. “There can’t ever be but one like you.” His hair hung in dark sweat-damp coils over his neck and trembled with his breathing.
I looked up at him. There was nothing I could say to him. There was no way I could say anything to him. I thought about going back to get Al to translate. But what would be the use? What would I say? I let my head drop forward on my chest, and when I raised it, he was already heading for the dressing room.
I lay there on the floor wishing I could go on with the workout, wishing I never had to stop. But I had to. I was pumped tight as a tick, and I could barely get my hands up high enough to touch my head.
The gym emptied out about five-thirty in the afternoon and stayed that way until after supper, around seven or seven-thirty, when the body-builders and boxers who could only train in the evening began to drift in. That’s when we always ate our supper, because Al didn’t like to eat after the gym closed at ten. Too late then, he said.
There were only two young kids and an old guy with a clubfoot in the gym, all three of them looking at themselves in the mirror. The smell of cooking food came from the kitchen. I didn’t want to eat, but I didn’t want to break the routine of things either. I didn’t want to think about the fact that she had been gone three hours, that she’d left with Aristotle and was not back yet, and I didn’t want to think about hurting that poor dummy because of her.
Jesus, the shit a man does have to go through to get to the end of it. I went back to the steam room and stripped. After I’d steamed down, I got under a shower as hot as I could stand it. I went down the hall to the kitchen and climbed up on my bed. The kid was sitting at the table, at the same place where I’d ruined his arm. He had his bandaged wrist hugged to his chest, and Al stood at the stove cooking. Pete came in and sat down at the table across from Leroy. I could tell by the way Al’s elbows were jerking on each side of his stiff back that he was slamming the pots around over the stove, making a big racket, probably mumbling and growling to himself. I got a magazine down and pretended to be reading it. After a while, Al came over and took the magazine out of my hand. Behind him, Pete and Leroy sat on opposite sides of the table staring at me. Bowls steamed between them.
“It’s ready,” Al said, concentrating on the spot just above my head where the first shelf of books started.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said.
“Hungry or not,” he said, “a balancer’s got to eat. You got to feed them arms.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
“Look,” he said.
I looked up and his eyes dropped directly into mine, and it was like he was touching me, like we were balancing each other over something thin and dangerous. I saw that his eyes had little chips of gold in them, and that the gold made them look almost like the eyes of a boy. He didn’t say anything for a long time and I felt very close to him. I wanted to tell him something good, something that would make him happy, but I didn’t know anything to say.
“Whatever it was, it was,” Al said. “You cain’t say what it was, Leroy cain’t say what it was. But it happened. Al don’t have to understand. Al can go on and not understand.” He touched my shoulder. “Come eat,” he said.
At the table, we all looked at our plates. Al had cooked fresh vegetables, broiled some mackerel and put a wedge of sharp cheese out, along with wild honey and cracked-wheat bread. But I didn’t taste it much. If I let myself think about it, the chair under me seemed to rock gently and inside my head the water lapped against the dock and I could hear a girl laughing.
Three rapid taps came through the wood of the table into my plate. I felt the taps run in the tines of the fork. I looked up, and across from me Leroy tapped with his knife again. He glanced at his arm and then back at me.
“It don’t matter, Marvin,” he said.
I looked at Al and said: “I’m sorry.”
Al said it to Leroy.
Leroy smiled. “Hell, it ain’t even broke,” he said. “X-rayed it and it ain’t even broke. Bruised bad. Something a little pulled. It’s what you call your fracture.” He touched the bandage with his good hand. “But this’ll be off before you can say Jack the rabbit been here and gone.”
“I’m glad for that,” I said.
Leroy said: “I used to have a dog that’d bite if you took something off his plate. It’s a natural—’’
“It wasn’t the meat, Leroy,” I said, “for Christ’s sake …”
Al slapped the table, not hard, just letting his thick palm drop flat beside his plate, but it was hard enough to make the bowls jump. “We cain’t get to the end of that,” said Al, “so we won’t talk about it anymore. Al don’t want to hear it.”
“Yes sir,” Leroy said, and dropped his eyes.
Al slapped the table again, this time harder, and Leroy’s eyes snapped up. “Now goddammit,” he said, “things are gonna be normal! Be like they were! Stop acting like this. Be happy!”
It was one of the few times I ever heard him curse and Leroy dropped his eyes to his plate again, but not before I saw that he looked like he was about to cry because Al had shouted at him. He mumbled, “Yes sir,” again and hugged his bandaged arm.
Al looked disgusted, like he wanted to spit. He got up from the table and walked stiffly back to his room. Pete and Leroy and I finished eating, or at least we sat there for a while before we got up. But I don’t think anybody ate very much. I went to my bed and lay down. This time I didn’t pretend to read. I just lay there with my hands behind my head and watched the window by the sink that looked out onto the building next door. Leroy had left the table and Pete was washing the dishes. I could feel the weights slamming to the floor out in the gym. The lifters were coming in. Somebody was doing heavy clean and jerks with the olympic bar.
