I turned and began running. That fence looked a long way away. It looked impossible. I couldn’t spare the time to look back. That might make the difference. I was flying, wide-eyed. I really moved! But they gained steadily! I could feel the ground shaking around me as they beat up the earth getting right down on me. I could hear them slobbering, I could hear them breathing. With the last of my strength I dug in and leaped the fence. I didn’t climb it. I sailed over it. And landed on my back in a ditch with one of those things poking his head over the fence and looking down at me.
In the car, they were all laughing. They thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Joyce was laughing louder than any of them.
The stupid beasts circled, then loped off.
I got out of the ditch and climbed in the car.
“I’ve seen the buffalo,” I said, “now let’s go catch a drink.”
They laughed all the way in. They’d stop and then somebody would start and then they all would start. Wally had to stop the car once. He couldn’t drive anymore. He opened the door and rolled out on the ground and laughed. Even grandma was getting hers, along with Joyce.
Later the story got around in town and there was a bit of swagger missing from my walk. I needed a haircut. I told Joyce.
She said, “Go to a barbershop.”
And I said, “I can’t. It’s the buffalo.”
“Are you afraid of those men in the barbershop?”
“It’s the buffalo,” I said.
Joyce cut my hair. She did a terrible job.
4
Then Joyce wanted to go back to the city. For all the drawbacks, that little town, haircuts or not, beat city life. It was quiet. We had our own house. Joyce fed me well.) Plenty of meat. Rich, good, well-cooked meat. I’ll say one thing for that bitch. She could cook. She could cook better than any woman I had ever known. Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly—all else is desperation.
But no, she wanted to go. Granny was always climbing her and she was pissed. Me, I rather enjoyed playing the villain. I had made her cousin, the town bully, back down. It had never been done before. On blue jean day everybody in town was supposed to wear blue jeans or get thrown in the lake. I put on my only suit and necktie and slowly, like Billy the Kid, with all eyes on me, I walked slowly through the town, looking in windows, stopping for cigars. I broke that town in half like a wooden match.
Later, I met the town doctor in the street. I liked him. He was always high on drugs. I was not a drug man, but in case I had to hide from myself for a few days, I knew I could get anything I wanted from him.
“We’ve got to leave,” I told him.
“You ought to stay here,” he said, “it’s a good life. Plenty of hunting and fishing. The air’s good. And no pressure. You own this town,” he said.
“I know, doc, but she wears the pants.”
5
So gramps wrote Joyce a big check and there we were. We rented a little house up on a hill, and then Joyce got this stupid moralistic thing.
“We both ought to get jobs,” Joyce said, “to prove to them that you are not after their money. To prove to them that we are self-sufficient.”
“Baby, that’s grammar school. Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. Out here we call it ‘hustling.’ I’d like to be a good hustler.”
She didn’t want it.
Then I explained that a man couldn’t find a job unless he had a car to drive around in. Joyce got on the phone and gramps sent the money on in. Next thing I knew I was sitting in a new Plymouth. She sent me out on the streets dressed in a fine new suit, 40 dollar shoes, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll try to stretch it out. Shipping clerk, that’s what I was. When you didn’t know how to do anything that’s what you become—a shipping clerk, receiving clerk, stock boy. I checked two ads, went to two places and both of the places hired me. The first place smelled like work, so I took the second.
So there I was with my gummed tape machine working in an art store. It was easy. There was only an hour or two of work a day. I listened to the radio, built a little office out of plywood, put an old desk in there, the telephone, and I sat around reading the Racing Form. I’d get bored sometimes and walk down the alley to the coffee shop and sit in there, drinking coffee, eating pie and flirting with the waitresses.
The truck drivers would come in:
“Where’s Chinaski?”
“He’s down at the coffeeshop.”
They’d come down there, have a coffee, and then we’d walk up the alley and do our bit, take a few cartons off the truck or throw them on. Something about a bill of lading.
They wouldn’t fire me. Even the salesmen liked me. They were robbing the boss out the back door but I didn’t say anything. That was their little game. It didn’t interest me. I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
6
There was death in that place on the hill. I knew it the first day I walked out the screen door and into the backyard. A zinging binging buzzing whining sound came right at me: 10,000 flies rose straight up into the air at once. All the backyards had these flies—there was this tall green grass and they nested in it, they loved it.
Oh Jesus Christ, I thought, and not a spider within 5 miles!
As I stood there, the 10,000 flies began to come back down out of the sky, settling down in the grass, along the fence, the ground, in my hair, on my arms, everywhere. One of the bolder ones bit me.
I cursed, ran out and bought the biggest fly sprayer you ever saw. I fought them for hours, raging we were, the flies and I, and hours later, coughing and sick from breathing the fly killer, I looked around and there were as many flies as ever. I think for each one I killed they got down in the grass and bred two. I gave it up.
The bedroom had this room-break encircling the bed. There were pots and the pots had geraniums in them. When I went to bed with Joyce the first time and we worked out, I noticed the boards begin to wave and shake.
Then plop.
“Oh oh!” I said.
“What’s the matter now?” asked Joyce. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”
“Baby, a pot of geraniums just fell on my ass.”
“Don’t stop! Go ahead!”
“All right, all right!”
I stoked up again, was going fairly well, then—
“Oh, shit!”
“What is it? What is it?”
“Another pot of geraniums, baby, hit me in the small of the back, rolled down my back to my ass, then dropped off.”
“God damn the geraniums! Go ahead! Go ahead!”
“Oh, all right…” All through the workout these pots kept falling down on me.
It was like trying to screw during an aerial attack. I finally made it. Later I said, “Look, baby, we’ve got to do something about those geraniums.”
“No, you leave them there!”
“Why, baby, why?”
“It adds to it.”
“It adds to it?”
“Yes.”
She just giggled. But the pots stayed up there. Most of the time.
7
Then I started coming home unhappy.
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
I had to get drunk every night.
“It’s the manager, Freddy. He has started whistling this song. He’s whistling it when I come in in the morning and he never stops, and he’s whistling it when I go home at night. It’s been going on for two weeks!”
“What’s the name of the song?”
“Around The World In Eighty Days. I never did like that song.”