3
What did you want, Joe Valentine? Where were you going? Wandering through countless nights, your cat on your shoulder!
The big man slouched through the alley behind Brailsford Junction's Main Street. He passed the litter of broken boxes, barrels and piles of rotting fruit in tangled shadows behind the Dingle Brothers' general store where bats swept low between the wooden buildings. His feet knew the cinders, and his eyes, like the cat's, could see in the dark.
He skirted the cubistic mountains of empty beer cases behind the Golden Glow Saloon, the heap of manure behind the livery stable, the jumble of wrecked parts and rusting bodies piled at the back door of the Ford Garage.
A dirty stream bubbled in the ditch that paralleled the alley, and a huge black rat bloated with young leapt up the ash pile almost level with his face. The cat stiffened like some electric thing, lashed his tail and sprang. The rat went back on her hind legs waving ineffectual little feet exposing her vast soft belly. A shadowy struggle, a high-pitched squeal of terror. The man laughed shortly; slouched on.
He passed the Ritz Royal Hotel smelling of hash and strong disinfectant; the barred back windows of the First National Bank; the empty ice-cream freezers and cartons behind the Tobacco City Ice Cream Parlor.
All closed, dark and deserted, no laughter or singing, the player piano still. From the high clock tower of the old town hall the chimes spilled the half hour. Far away across the river a train whistled, rumbled over the railroad bridge, was muffled by the intervening hills, rushed dangerously upon the town screaming and clanging, swept westward, died away in a distant whisper of steam and clicking of wheels which lasted in the imagination long after the night was once more silent and deserted.
The air was cool now after the long hot day. A breeze from the river valley to the east of the town swept through the alley stirring little whirlpools of dust. The air was suddenly filled with the cool breath of rotting oak leaves, dank river odors, algæ, fish and flowing water.
He thought of a shack among the willows, a box-car home on the river bottom; his mother coming home early in the morning, lighting the fire as though she had not been gone for nearly a month. Her dancing slippers were covered with mud, her party dress torn. The big man who was his father turned in his bunk, swore at the woman, went out banging the sagging screen door.
"Look Mother," Joe whispered, "we got a new kitten while you was gone."
River smells, fishing catfish down at the narrows, sitting all night on the sandbar listening to the "tick, tick," far down underneath the water, the splash of muskrats, the little crying noises made by raccoons in the cornfield on the hill, the whip-poor-wills, and the hoarse cry of night birds following the river.
Oars dipping into the water, boats being pulled up on distant sandbars, the mosquitoes and the damp chill, the lordly battle with a sixteen pound catfish in the dark. Bad whiskey, later on a woman.
He breathed the night air wistfully. Never again a woman's arms about him. Lost, deprived, utterly alone. He was not aware of these thoughts as words. He did not think in words but in odors, colors, sounds, and a blind hatred which he could not understand. Cheated, haunted by some unknown thing, filled with sudden fear at a footfall, foolhardy in the face of actual danger. A man who could no longer call himself a man since that knife fight with a nigger in Rockford, Illinois.
He came at last to the one light burning in the alley, a dim green globe above a door (three steps down) between two walls of sweating brick.
The twenty-six legitimate saloons serving the eighteen hundred inhabitants of Brailsford Junction were closed at this hour. Only the blind pig offered solace to the Dago section men, the farm hands making a night of it in town, and Hannah Leary who had spent half her life looking up at ceilings of empty box-cars on the siding and at stars above the Brailsford Junction Cemetery.
Joe hesitated at the top of the stairs, drinking in the aroma of the place: sweat, rot-gut whiskey, women. He ran the tip of his tongue over his full, loose lips; felt in his pocket for change.
A big man stumbled out of the door at the foot of the stairs, started forward, saw Joe blocking the way, and roared in a drunken voice—
"Getahelloutamawayou."
Joe did not move.
The man lunged forward, fell, leapt to his feet and charged up the stairs—
"Outamawaygodamnya."
Joe tipped him over with a right to the chin. At the bottom of the stairs once more the man drew a knife and waited his chance. Joe took a pair of brass knuckles out of his pocket, slipped them onto his hands, pressed the buttons with his thumbs and little knives appeared on each knuckle. He slashed at the air breathing deeply and feeling fine. He pranced on his toes.
"Come on up," he offered.
The other was more careful now, almost sober. He advanced a step at a time watching his footing, his knife drawn down and back for the uprip, the belly slash. He stank of whiskey and bad teeth.
Joe let him reach the top of the stairs before he aimed a kick at the knife arm. The man dropped the knife, howling with pain, his arm half paralyzed. He threw caution to the winds, swung with his left, and tried to close. Joyfully, methodically, Joe slashed him to ribbons with the brass knuckles.
The man went down screaming and writhing while Joe ran lightly up the alley. He met the cat who sprang up and settled himself in the crook of Joe's arm. The cat was heavier now and licking his jowls with contentment. Together they dodged through the dark streets and alleys, between houses, and through the Crandall garden to the back door.
"Time we were leaving this dump," Joe told the cat.
A moment now for throwing his clothes and other few belongings into a knapsack, another moment for mussing up his bed as though he had been sleeping there all night, back to the kitchen door again where Temperance Crandall stood in her long white nightgown, a lamp in her hands.
He reached in his pocket for three dollars and put it on the kitchen table beside the door.
"Keep it," she said.
"Ain't that what you wanted?"
"I don't want your money."
He left her standing there looking at the three dollars on the table. He swung off down the dark street with his cat and knapsack, struck out into the country along the back roads which ran among the poor hill farms to the northeast. The farmhouses were dark. The cattle slept in the pastures. Hay was cocked in the fields and the mingled smells of drying alfalfa, timothy, red clover, and sweet clover came to his nostrils.
Like that early morning he had come along the country road and stopped to pump himself a drink at the farmhouse, and the woman had come out. That was before the fight in Rockford.
He swung along the dark roads talking to his cat, watching the sky with its sprinkling of large stars. He did not feel so lost since his fight. He almost remembered what it was he was searching for.
And so he came at last to the deserted hunting lodge on Lake House Point early in the morning with the sun on the whitecaps of Lake Koshkonong and the gulls screaming greedily about the cliff.
He looked across the bay to where Stud Brailsford's barns and growing fields lay sunning under the shoulder of Cottonwood Hill.