Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [70]
Abe stayed on the ground. He was crying. He was holding his left arm.
“I think my arm is broken,” he said.
“Get up, chickenshit.”
Abe finally got up and walked off the field, crying and holding his arm.
I looked around. “All right,” I said, “let’s play ball!”
But everybody was walking away, even the girls. The game was evidently over. I hung around a while and then I started walking home…
Just before dinner the phone rang. My mother answered it. Her voice became very excited. She hung up and I heard her talking to my father.
Then she came into my bedroom.
“Please come to the front room,” she said.
I walked in and sat on the couch. They each had a chair. It was always that way. Chairs meant you belonged. The couch was for visitors.
“Mrs. Mortenson just phoned. They’ve taken x-rays. You broke her son’s arm.”
“It was an accident,” I said.
“She says she is going to sue us. She’ll get a Jewish lawyer. They’ll take everything we have.”
“We don’t have very much.”
My mother was one of those silent criers. As she cried the tears came faster and faster. Her cheeks were starting to glisten in the evening twilight.
She wiped her eyes. They were a dull light brown.
“Why did you break that boy’s arm?”
“It was a pop-up. We both went for it.”
“What is this ‘pop-up’?”
“Whoever gets it, gets it.”
“So you got the ‘pop-up’?”
“Yes.”
“But how can this ‘pop-up’ help us? The Jewish lawyer will still have the broken arm on his side.”
I got up and walked back to my bedroom to wait for dinner. My father hadn’t said anything. He was confused. He was worried about losing what little he had but at the same time he was very proud of a son who could break somebody’s arm.
43
Jimmy Hatcher worked part time in a grocery store. While none of us could get jobs he could always get one. He had his little movie star face and his mother had a great body. With his face and her body he didn’t have trouble finding employment.
“Why don’t you come up to the apartment after dinner tonight?” he asked me one day.
“What for?”
“I steal all the beer I want. I take it out the back. We can drink the beer.”
“Where you got it?”
“In the refrigerator.”
“Show me.”
We were about a block a way from his place. We walked over. In the hallway Jimmy said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to check the mail.” He took out his key and opened the lock box. It was empty. He locked it again.
“My key opens this woman’s box. Watch.”
Jimmy opened the box and pulled out a letter and opened it. He read the letter to me. “Dear Betty: I know that this check is late and that you’ve been waiting for it. I lost my job. I have found another one, but it put me behind. Here’s the check, finally. I hope that everything is all right with you. Love, Don.”
jimmy took the check and looked at it. He tore it up and he tore the letter up and he put the pieces in his coat pocket. Then he locked the mailbox.
“Come on.”
We went into his apartment and into the kitchen and he opened the refrigerator. It was packed with cans of beer.
“Does your mother know?”
“Sure. She drinks it.”
He closed the refrigerator.
“Jim, did your father really blow his brains out because of your mother?”
“Yeah. He was on the telephone. He told her he had a gun. He said, ‘If you don’t come back to me I’m going to kill myself. Will you come back to me?’ And my mother said, ‘No.’ There was a shot and that was that.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She hung up.”
“All right, I’ll see you tonight.”
I told my parents that I was going over to Jimmy’s to do some homework with him. My kind of homework, I thought to myself.
“Jimmy’s a nice boy,” my mother said.
My father didn’t say anything.
Jimmy got the beer out and we began. I really liked it. Jimmy’s mother worked at a bar until 2 a.m. We had the place to ourselves.
“Your mother really has a body, Jim. How come some women have great bodies and most of the others look like they’re deformed? Why can’t all women have great bodies?”
“God, I don’t know. Maybe if women were all the same we’d get bored with them.”
“Drink some more. You drink