Minor comes back in his narrow runway behind the counter the better to address the boys in their dim booths. “We should’ve kept marching when we hit the Elbe and taken Moscow when we had the chance. They were rotten and ready for us, the Russian soldier is the most cowardly in the world. The peasants would have risen up to greet us. That’s what old Churchill wanted us to do, and he was right. He was a crook but clever, clever. He didn’t love Old Joe. Nobody, in the world loved Old Joe but King Franklin.”.Peter says, “Minor, you really are insane. What about Leningrad? They weren’t cowardly then.”
“They didn’t win it. They did not win it. Our equipment won it. Our tanks. Our guns. Sent courtesy free parcel post by your good friend FDR; he robbed the American people to save the Russians who then turn right around and are ready to march this minute over the Alps into Italy.”
“He was trying to beat Hitler, Minor. Don’t you remember? Adolf H-I-T-L-E-R.”
“I love Hitler,” Johnny Dedman announces. “He’s alive in Argentina.”
“Minor loved him too,” Peter says, reedy-voiced with fury and hot in all his limbs. “Didn’t you, Minor? Didn’t you think Hitler was a nice man?”
“I never did,” Minor says. “But I’ll tell you this. I’d rather have Hitler alive than old Joe Stalin. There is the Devil Incarnate. You mark my words.”
“Minor, what do you have against Communism? They wouldn’t make you go to work. You’re too old. You’re too sick.”
“Bam. Bam” Johnny Dedman cries. “We should’ve dropped an atom bomb on Moscow, Berlin, Paris, France, Italy, Mexico City, and Africa. Ka-Pow. I love that mushroom-shaped cloud.”
“Minor,” Peter says. “Minor. Why do you exploit us poor teenagers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal? You’ve got the board of the pinball machine tilted so steeply nobody except Dedman can get any free games out of it and he’s a genius.”
“I am a genius,” Dedman says. “They don’t even believe in a Divine Creator,” Minor states.
“Well, my God, who does?” Peter exclaims, blushing for himself but unable to halt, so anxious is he to pin this man who with his black Republican stupidity and stubborn animal vigor embodies everything in the world that is killing Peter’s father; he has to keep Minor from turning his back, he has to hold, as it were, the world open. “You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. Really.” Yet in this boast, now that it is issued, Peter perceives an abysmal betrayal of his father. In his mind he sees his father slip into a pit stunned. He waits, so hungrily his mouth feels parched, for Minor’s rejoinder, whatever it might be, so that in the twists and detours of argument he can find a way to retract. So much of Peter’s energy is spent in wishing he could take back things he has said. “I believe you,” Minor says simply, turning. The way out is sealed.
“In two years,” Johnny Dedman estimates aloud, “there’ll be a war. I’ll be a major. Minor will be a first sergeant. Peter will be peeling potatoes in the back of the kitchen, behind the garbage pails.” He softly blows one swelling smoke ring and then, the miracle, makes his mouth as tiny and tight as a keyhole and puffs out a smaller ring which, spinning quickly, passes through the larger. At the moment of interpenetration both blur, and a loose cloud of smoke lengthens like an arm reaching for the light-cord. Dedman sighs, a bored creator.
“Rotten in the head at Yalta,” Minor calls from far up the counter, “and Truman at Potsdam as dumb as they come. That man was so dumb his haberdashery store went bankrupt and the next minute he’s running the United States of America.”
The door bucks open, and the darkness on the porch materializes into a hard figure in a bullet cap. “Peter here?” it asks.
“Mr. Caldwell,” Minor says in that basso he reserves for greeting adults. “Yes he is. He was just telling me he’s an atheistic Communist.”
“He just does that to kid you. You know that. There isn’t a man in town he thinks more of than Minor Kretz. You’re a father to that boy, and don’t think his mother and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Hey Daddy,” Peter calls, embarrassed for him.
Caldwell comes back toward the booths, blinking; he seems unable to find his son. He stops at Dedman’s booth. “Who’s this? Oh. Dedman. Haven’t they got you graduated yet?”
“Hi there George,” Dedman says. Caldwell does not expect much from his students but he does expect the dignity of formal address. Of course they sense this. Cruelty is clever where goodness is imbecile. “I hear your swimming team lost again. What does that make it? Eighty in a row?”
“They tried,” Caldwell tells him. “If you don’t have the cards, you can’t manufacture ‘em.”
“Hey, I got some cards,” Dedman says, his cheeks glowing ripely, his long lashes curled. “Look at my cards, George.” He reaches into the pocket of his forest-green shirt for the pornographic deck.
“Put them away,” Minor calls from far up in his runway. Electric light bleaches his skull and strikes cool sparks from the dried Coke glasses.
Caldwell does not seem to hear. He walks on to the booth where his son sits smoking a Kool. Giving no sign of seeing the cigarette, he slides in opposite Peter and says, “Jesus, a funny thing happened to me just now.”
“What? How is the car?”
“The car, believe it or not, is fixed. I don’t know how Hummel does it; he’s what you call a master of his trade.
He’s treated me swell all my life.” A new thought pricks him and he turns his head. “Dedman? You still here?”
Dedman has been holding his cards in his lip and fanning through them. He looks up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”
“Why don’t you quit school and get a job with Hummel? As I remember, you’re a natural mechanic.”
The boy shrugs uncomfortably under this unexpected thrust of concern. He says, “I’m waiting for the war.”
“You’ll wait until Doomsday, kid,” the teacher calls to him.
“Don’t bury your talent in the ground. Let your light shine. If I had your mechanical talent, this poor kid here would be eating caviar.”
“I got a police record.”
“So did Bing Crosby. So did St. Paul. They didn’t let that stop ‘em. Don’t use it as a crutch. You talk to Al Hummel. I never had a better friend in this town, and I was in worse shape than you are. You’re just eighteen; I was thirty-five.”
Agitated, Peter takes a puff made hopelessly awkward by his father’s presence and stubs out his Kool half-smoked. He yearns to divert his father from this conversation, which he knows Dedman in retelling will make into a joke. “Daddy, what was the funny thing?” He is overswept, as the smoke soaks his lungs with its mild poison, by a wave of distaste for all this mediocre, fruitless, cloying involvement. Somewhere there is a city where he will be free.
His father speaks so only he can hear. “I was walking through the hall ten minutes ago and Zimmerman’s door bumps open and who the hell pops out but Mrs. Herzog.”
“Well what’s so funny about that? She’s on the school board.”
“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I guess you’re old enough now; she looked loved up.”
Peter giggles in surprise. “Loved up?” He laughs again and regrets having stubbed out his cigarette, which now seems priggish.
“There’s a look women get. In their faces. She had it, until she saw me.”
“But how? Was she wearing all her clothes?”
“Sure, but her hat looked crooked. And her lipstick had been smeared.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh is right. It’s something I wasn’t meant to see.”
“Well it’s not your fault, you were just walking down the hall.”
“That doesn’t matter, it wasn’t my fault; if that was the rule nothing is ever anybody’s fault. The fact is, kid, I walked right into a nest of trouble, Zimmerman’s been playing cat-and-mouse with me for fifteen years and this is the end of the line.”
“Oh, Daddy. Your imagination is so fertile. She was probably in there consulting about something, you know Zim erman makes appointments for all hours.”