He laughed. “That’s not a good reason, Suzy.”
She tried another tack. “Everybody hates a coward—”
“If I’m a coward, whose business is it?”
“You got to write it, Doc.”
“I won’t!”
“I’d help you if I could.”
“What in the world could you do?”
Her face flamed. “Maybe give you a kick in the ass. Maybe that’s what you need.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” he said. And then, “Goddam it! You’ve done it again—you made me pass over the time!”
“You done it yourself,” said Suzy, “you lousy stiff! You blame everybody else. You done it yourself.”
“Get on back to the whore house!” he shouted. “Go on! Get out!”
In the doorway she stopped and looked back. “God, how I hate a fool!” she said, and she slammed the door behind her.
In a moment there was a tap on the glass.
“Go on home!” Doc shouted.
Mack opened the door. “It ain’t Suzy, it’s me.”
“You were listening.”
“No, I wasn’t. Say, Doc, would you say a piece of property on Cannery Row was a good investment?”
“No,” said Doc.
“She’s quite a dame,” said Mack.
“I thought you said you weren’t listening.”
“Listen, Doc, nobody in this block listening—but everybody heard. You know, they say there’s three good reasons for marrying a hustler.”
“What are you talking about?” said Doc.
Mack counted on his fingers. “Number one, she ain’t likely to wander—she’s done all her experimenting. Number two, you ain’t likely to surprise her or disappoint her. And number three, if a hustler goes for you she ain’t got but one reason.”
Doc watched him, hypnotized. “What reason?”
“She likes you. Good night, Doc.”
“Sit down—have a drink.”
“I can’t. I got to get some sleep. I got work to do tomorrow. ’Night Doc.”
Doc looked at the door after Mack had closed it. The grain of the unpainted pine seemed to squirm to his weary eyes.
19
Sweet Thursday (1)
Looking backward in time, you can usually find the day it started, the day of Sarajevo, the day of Munich, the moment of Stalingrad or Valley Forge. You fix the day and hour by some incident that happened to yourself. You remember exactly what you were doing when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.[80]
There is no doubt that forces were in motion on that Thursday in Cannery Row. Some of the causes and directions have been in process for generations. There are always some people who claim they felt it coming. Those who remember say it felt like earthquake weather.
It was a Thursday, and it was one of those days in Monterey when the air is washed and polished like a lens, so that you can see the houses in Santa Cruz twenty miles across the bay and you can see the redwood trees on a mountain above Watsonville. The stone point of Frémont’s Peak, clear the other side of Salinas, stands up nobly against the east. The sunshine had a goldy look and red geraniums burned the air around them. The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.
There aren’t many days like that anyplace. People treasure them. Little kids are likely to give off tin-whistle screams for no reason, and businessmen find it necessary to take a drive to look at a piece of property. Old people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that. Horses roll in the green pastures on such a day and hens make a terrible sunny racket.
Thursday was that magic kind of day. Miss Winch, who took pride in her foul disposition before noon, said good morning to the postman.
Joe Elegant awakened early, intending to work on his novel, on the scene where the young man digs up his grandmother to see if she was as beautiful as he remembered. You will recall his novel, The Pi Root of Oedipus. But Joe Elegant saw the golden light on the vacant lot and a dew diamond in the heart of every mallow leaf. He went out in the damp grass in his bare feet and scampered like a kitten until he got to sneezing.
Miss Graves, who sings the lead in the butterfly pageant in Pacific Grove, saw her first leprechaun up in back of the reservoir—but you can’t tell everything that happened every place on that Sweet Thursday.
For Mack and the boys it was the morning of Truth, and since Mack was to bear the brunt of it, his friends cooked him a hot breakfast and Eddie mixed real bourbon whisky in the coffee. Hazel polished Mack’s shoes and brushed his best blue jeans. Whitey No. 1 brought out his father’s hat for Mack to wear—a narrow-brimmed black hat, the crown peaked up to a point. Whitey No. 1’s father had been a switchman on the Southern Pacific, and this hat proved it. He stuffed toilet paper in back of the sweatband until it fitted Mack perfectly.
Mack didn’t talk. He knew how much depended on him, and he was brave and humble at the same time. The boys put the carefully printed tickets in his hand and saw him off, and then they sat down in the weeds to wait. They knew Mack was quaking inside.
Mack went down the chicken walk and across the railroad track. He passed the old boiler and rapped on the rusty pipes in a wild show of bravado.
In front of the grocery he studied a display of screw drivers with loving intensity before he went in.
Cacahuete was behind the counter, studying a copy of Down Beat.[81] He wore a purple windbreaker with gold piping. A lean and handsome boy, he had the wild and sullen light of genius in his eyes.
“Hi!” said Mack.
“Jar!” said Cacahuete.
“Joseph and Mary around?”
“Upstairs.”
“I want to see him personal,” said Mack.
Cacahuete gave him a long, surly stare, then went to the back of the store and called, “Tío mio!”[82]
“What do you want?”
“Mack wants to see you.”
“What about?”
“Who knows?”
Joseph and Mary came down the stairs in a pale blue silk bathrobe.
“’Morning, Mack. These kids have no manners.”
Cacahuete shrugged and took his Down Beat to the top of the potato bin.
“You’re out early,” said the Patrón.
Mack began with ceremonial seriousness, “You ain’t been here long, Joseph and Mary, but you’ve made a lot of friends, good friends.”
The Patrón inspected this statement and made a note of its slight inaccuracy. Still, he had nothing to lose by going along with it. “I like the people around here,” he said. “They treat me good.” His eyelids lowered sleepily, which meant he was as alert as a radar screen.
Mack said, “In a little town you get kind of hidebound. But you’re a man of the world. You been all over. You know how things is.”
The Patrón smiled and acknowledged his wisdom and waited.
“I and the boys want to ask your advice,” said Mack. “You ain’t likely to get a wild hair.”
A vague uneasiness stirred in the Patrón. “What’s it about?” he asked tentatively.
Mack drew a deep breath. “A smart businessman like you might think it was silly, but maybe you been here long enough to get it. It’s a sentimental thing. It’s about Doc. I and the boys owe Doc a debt we ain’t never going to be able to repay.”
“How much?” asked the Patrón. He upended a broom and tore out a straw with which to pick his teeth. “Take a powder,” he said softly to Cacahuete, and his nephew slithered upstairs.
“It ain’t money,” said Mack, “it’s gratitude. For years Doc’s took care of us—get sick he cures us, get broke he’s there with a buck.”
80
Sarajevo…Pearl Harbor: World War I was precipitated by the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. The roots of Europe’s entrance into World War II occurred on September 29, 1938, when Adolf Hitler orchestrated the Munich Agreement (signed by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain), which allowed the Third Reich to expand its control over the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. The Battle of Stalingrad, during which Soviet troops defeated the German Sixth Army and other Axis troops, began on August 21, 1942, and lasted over five months. On December 19, 1777, George Washington’s ragtag Continental Army entered their winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they remained for seven months while being rigorously retrained and reorganized. Japan’s surprise air attack on the United States’ Pacific naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, took place on December 7, 1941.
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