• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6074 0

I wouldn’t pull anything. He’s proved his point on the car. And I’ve seen the gun. Should I run? Since I had discovered on Thanksgiving Day how fast I could still run, I seemed oddly eager to use this ability. Speed was one of my resources. Some people are too fast for their own good, like Asahel in the Book of Samuel. Still it occurred to me that I might dash up the stairs of the Bath and take shelter in the cashier’s office where the little steel boxes were. I could crouch on the floor and ask the cashier to pass the four hundred and fifty dollars through the grille to Cantabile. I knew the cashier quite well. But he’d never let me in. He couldn’t. I wasn’t bonded. He had once referred to this special circumstance when we were having a chat. But I couldn’t believe that Cantabile would batter me down. Not in the street. Not as I waited and bowed my head. And just at that moment I remembered Konrad Lorenz’s discussion of wolves. The defeated wolf offered his throat, and the victor snapped but wouldn’t bite. So I was bowing my head. Yes, but damn my memory! What did Lorenz say next? Humankind was different, but in what respect? How! I couldn’t remember. My brain was disintegrating. The day before, in the bathroom, I hadn’t been able to find the word for the isolation of the contagious, and I was in agony. I thought, whom should I telephone about this? My mind is going! And then I stood and clutched the sink until the word “quarantine” mercifully came back to me. Yes, quarantine, but I was losing my grip. I take such things hard. In old age my father’s memory also failed. So I was shaken. The difference between man and other species such as the wolves never did come back to me. Perhaps the lapse was excusable at a time like this. But it served to show how carelessly I was reading, these days. This inattentiveness and memory-failure boded no good.

As the last of a string of cars passed, Cantabile took a long stride with both bats as if to rush upon me without a pause. But I yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Cantabile!”

He paused. I held up open hands. Then he flung one of the bats into the Thunderbird and started for me with the other.

I called out to him, “I brought the money. You don’t have to beat my brains out.”

“You got a gun?”

“I’ve got nothing.”

“You come over here,” he said.

I started willingly to cross the street. He made me stop in the middle.

“Stay right there,” he said. I was in the center of heavy traffic, cars honking and the provoked drivers rolling down their windows, already fighting mad. He tossed the second bat back into the T-bird. Then he strode up and took hold of me roughly. He treated me as if I deserved the extreme penalty. I held out the money, I offered it to him on the spot. But he refused to look at it. Furious he pushed me onto the sidewalk and toward the stairs of the Bath and past the squirming barbershop cylinders of red white and blue. We hurried in, past the cashier’s cage and along the dirty corridor.

“Go on, go on,” said Cantabile.

“Where do you want to go?”

“To the can. Where is it?”

“Don’t you want the dough?”

“I said the can! The can!”

I then understood, his bowels were acting up, he had been caught short, he had to go to the toilet, and I was to go with him. He wouldn’t allow me to wait in the street. “Okay,” I said, “just take it easy and I’ll lead you.” He followed me through the locker room. The John entrance was doorless. Only the individual stalls have doors. I motioned him forward and was about to sit down on one of the locker-room benches nearby but he gave me a hard push on the shoulder and drove me forward. These toilets are the Bath at its worst. The radiators put up a stunning dry heat. The tiles are never washed, never disinfected. A hot dry urine smell rushes to your eyes like onion fumes. “Jesus!” said Cantabile. He kicked open a stall, still keeping me in front of him. He said, “You go in first.”

“The both of us?” I said.

“Hurry up.”

“There’s space only for one.”

He tugged out his gun and shook the butt at me. “You want this in your teeth?” The black fur of