The porches, their peeling paint like dead, flaking skin, were wide and empty except for an occasional piece of soiled furniture. One porch Feldman passed, old like the rest, had on it a new card table and four brightly chromed, red plastic-upholstered chairs, probably the prize in a church bingo party. The self-conscious newness of the set, out of place in the context of the neighborhood, had been quickly canceled by the universal soot which had already begun to settle over it, and which, Feldman imagined, through that same silent consent to all conditions here, had not been wiped away.
Behind the window of each tavern Feldman passed was the sign of some brewery. They hung, suspended neon signatures, red against the dark interiors. He went into one of the bars. Inside it was almost dark, but the room glowed with weird, subdued colors, as though it were lighted by a juke box which was burning out. The place smelled of urine and beer. The floor was cement, the color of an overcast sky.
There were no other men in the tavern. Two women, one the barmaid, a coarse, thick-set woman whose dirty linen apron hung loosely from her big body, stood beside an electric bowling machine. She held the hands of a small boy who was trying to intercept the heavy silver disk that the other woman, probably his mother, aimed down the sanded wooden alley of the machine.
“Let me. Let me,” the boy said.
The mother, a thin girl in a man’s blue jacket, was wearing a red babushka. Under it, her blond hair, pulled tightly back on her head, almost looked wet. The child continued to squirm in the older woman’s grasp. The mother, looking toward a glass of beer set on the edge of the machine, spoke to the woman in the apron. “Don’t let him, Rose. He’ll knock over the beer.”
“He wants to play.”
“I’ll break his hands he wants to play. Where’s his dime?”
Feldman sat down on a stool at the bar. The barmaid, seeing him, let go of the child and stepped behind the bar. “What’ll you have?” she said.
“Have you sandwiches?”
“Yeah. Cheese. Salami. Ham and cheese.”
“Ham and cheese.”
She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a dusty plastic pie bell and brought it to him. “You must be new around here. Usually I say ‘What’ll you have?’ the guy answers ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ It’s a joke.”
Feldman, who had not often drunk beer even before his illness, suddenly felt a desire to have some. “I’ll have some ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ ”
The woman drew it for him and put it next to his sandwich. “You a social worker?” she asked.
“No,” Feldman said, surprised.
“Rose thinks every guy wears a suit he’s a social worker,” the blond girl said, sitting down next to him. “Especially the suit don’t fit too good.” The child had run to the machine and was throwing the silver disk against its back wall. The machine, still activated, bounced the disk back to him.
“Don’t scratch the surface,” the woman behind the bar yelled at him. “Look, he scratches the surface, the company says I’m responsible. They won’t give me a machine.”
“Petey, come away from the machine. Rose is gonna break your hands.” Looking again at Rose, she said, “He don’t even carry a case.”
“Could be he’s a parole officer,” Rose said.
“No,” Feldman said.
“We ain’t used up the old one yet,” the blond woman said, grinning.
Feldman felt the uncomfortable justice of these speculations, made almost as though he were no longer in the room with them. He finished his beer and held up his glass to be refilled.
“You got people in this neighborhood, mister?”
“Yes,” he said. “My old grandmother lives here.”
“Yeah?” the woman behind the bar said.
“What’s her name?” the blond girl asked suspiciously.
Feldman looked at the thin blonde. “Sterchik,” he said. “Dubja Sterchik.”
“Dubja Finklestein,” the girl said. She took off her blue jacket. Feldman saw that her arms, though thin, were very muscular. She raised her hand to push some hair that had come loose back under the tight caress of the red babushka. He saw that the inside of her white wrist was tattooed. In thin blue handwriting, the letters not much thicker than ink on an ordinary envelope, was the name “Annie.” He looked away quickly, as though inadvertently he had seen something he shouldn’t have, as though the girl had leaned forward and he had looked down her blouse and seen her breasts.
“I don’t know nobody named Dubja Sterchik,” Rose said to him. “Maybe she drinks across the street with Stanley,” she added.
He finished the second glass of beer and, getting used to the taste, asked for another. He wondered whether, had they known he was a dying man, they would have been alarmed at his outlandish casualness in strolling into a strange bar in a neighborhood where he had never been. He wondered whether they would be startled to realize that he had brought to them, strangers, the last pieces of his life, giving no thought now to reclamation, since one could not reclaim, ever, what one still had, no matter how fragile or even broken it might be. He held the beer in his mouth until it burned the soft skin behind his lips. It felt good to feel pain in an area where, for once, it was not scheduled. He felt peculiarly light-hearted.
He turned to the girl beside him. “Your husband work around here?”
“A1?”
“Yes, Al. Does Al work around here?”
She nodded. “When Al works, he works around here.”
Feldman smiled. He felt stirrings which were now so unfamiliar to him he had to remember deliberately what they were. The death rattle is starting in my pants, he thought, dismissing what he could not take seriously. It would not be dismissed. Instead, the warmth he felt began to crowd him, to push him into unaccustomed corners. You’ve got the wrong man, he thought. He was not sure, however, which instincts he encouraged, which side he was on.
Feldman was surprised to discover that he really wanted to talk to her, to tell her that he had come with his disease into their small tavern to die for them. He thought jealously of the blond girl’s husband, the man Al, with lunch pail and silk team bowling jacket. She rubs him with her wounded wrist, he thought, excited.
“Would you like another drink?” he asked the girl haltingly. “Would you?” he asked again. He looked at her shabby clothes. “I just got paid today,” he added.
“Why not?” she said lightly. The little boy came over to her, drew her down and whispered something in her ear. The woman looked up at Feldman. “Excuse me,” she said, “he needs to pee.”
“Of course,” Feldman said stiffly. She took the child through a little door at the back of the tavern. When the door swung open Feldman could see cases of beer stacked on both sides of the lidless toilet. He turned to the woman behind the bar. “I want to buy a bottle of whiskey,” he said to her. “We’ll sit in that booth over there.”
“I don’t sell by the bottle. This ain’t no package store.”
“I’ll pay you,” he said.
“What are you, a jerk, mister? I run a nice place. I don’t want to have to throw you out.”
“It’s all right. I just want to talk.”
“She’s got a kid.”
“I just want to talk to her,” he said. “Here, here,” he said quietly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two loose bills and flung them on the counter. The woman laughed at him.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. She handed him a bottle.
Feldman took it and walked unsteadily to the booth. When the woman brought two glasses, he poured a drink and swallowed it quickly. He felt as though a time limit had been imposed upon him, that it was all right to do anything in the world he wanted so long as he did it quickly. He saw the door at the rear of the tavern open and the girl step out. She leaned over her son, buttoning his pants. Feldman bit his lips. She straightened and, seeing Feldman sitting in the booth, glanced quickly at the woman behind the bar. The woman shrugged and held up the two five-dollar bills. The girl took the boy to the bowling machine and put a dime into its slot for him. He watched her as she came slowly toward his table. He was sure she wore no underclothing. He motioned for her to sit down. “There’s more room,” he said apologetically, indicating the booth.