Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [46]
“You don’t think I know what I’m doing, Mr. Cantabile?”
“No you don’t. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”
Well, he may have been right. But at least I wasn’t crucifying anyone. Apparently life had not happened to me as it had happened to other people. For some indiscernible reason it happened differently to them, and so I was not a fit judge of their concerns and desires. Aware of this I acceded to more of these desires than was practical. I gave in to George’s low-life expertise. Now I bent before Cantabile. My only resource was to try to remember useful things from my ethological reading about rats, geese, sticklebacks, and dancing flies. What good is all this reading if you can’t use it in the crunch? All I asked was a small mental profit.
“Anyway, what about these fifty-dollar bills?” I said.
“I’ll let you know when I’m ready to take them,” he said. “You didn’t like what happened to your car, did you?”
I said, “It’s a beautiful machine. It was really heartless to do that.”
Apparently the bats he had threatened me with were what he had used on the Mercedes and there were probably more assault weapons in the back seat of the Thunderbird. He made me get into this showy auto. It had leather bucket seats red as spilt blood and an immense instrument panel. He took off at top speed from a standstill, like an adolescent drag-racer, the tires wildly squealing.
In the car I got a slightly different impression of him. Seen in profile, his nose ended in a sort of white bulb. It was intensely, abnormally white. It reminded me of gypsum and it was darkly lined. His eyes were bigger than they ought to have been, artificially dilated perhaps. His mouth was wide, with an emotional underlip in which there was the hint of an early struggle to be thought full grown. His large feet and dark eyes also hinted that he aspired to some ideal, and that his partial attainment or nonattainment of the ideal was a violent grief to him. I suspected that the ideal itself might be fitful.
“Was it you or your cousin Emil that fought in Vietnam?”
We were speeding eastward on Division Street. He held the wheel in both hands as though it were a pneumatic drill to chop up the macadam. “What! Emil in the Army? Not that kid. He was 4-F, practically psycho. No, the most action Emil ever saw was during the 1968 riots in front of the Hilton. He was twigged out and didn’t even know which side he was on. No, I was in Vietnam. The folks sent me to that smelly Catholic college near St. Louis that I mentioned at the game, but I dropped out and enlisted. That was some time back.”
“Did you fight?”
“I’ll tell you what you want to hear. I stole a tank of gasoline —the truck, trailer, and all. I sold it to some blackmarket guys. I got caught but my folks made a deal. Senator Dirksen helped. I was only eight months in jail.”
He had a record of his own. He wished me to know that he was a true Cantabile, a throwback to the Twenties and no mere Uncle Moochy. A military prison—he had a criminal pedigree and he could produce fear on his own credentials. Also the Can-tabiles were evidently in small rackets of the lesser hoodlum sort, as witness the toilet-disinfectant business on Clybourne Avenue. Perhaps also a currency exchange or two—currency exchanges were often owned by former small-time racketeers. Or in the extermination business, another common favorite. But he was obviously in the minor leagues. Perhaps he was in no league at all. As a Chicagoan I had some sense of this. A real big shot used hired muscle. No Vito Langobardi would carry baseball bats in the back seat of his car. A Langobardi went to Switzerland for winter sports. Even his dog traveled in class. Not in decades had a Langobardi personally taken part in violence. No, this restless striving smoky-souled Cantabile was