Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [53]
When we were out of the building again I said, “Wasn’t that okay?”
“Okay—yes! Okay!” he said loud and bitter. Clearly he wasn’t ready to let me off. Not yet.
“I figure that old pelican will pass the word around that I paid you. Wasn’t that the object?”
I added, almost to myself, “I wonder who makes pants like the pants the old boy was wearing. The fly alone must have been three feet long.”
But Cantabile was still stoking his anger. “Christ!” he said. I didn’t like the way he was staring at me under those straight bodkin brows.
“Well, then, that does it,” I said. “I can get a cab.”
Cantabile caught me by the sleeve. “You wait,” he said. I didn’t really know what to do. After all, he carried a gun. I had for a long time thought about having a gun too, Chicago being what it is. But they’d never give me a license. Cantabile, without a license, packed a pistol. There was one index of the difference between us. Only God knew what consequences such differences might bring. “Aren’t you enjoying our afternoon?” said Cantabile, and grinned.
Attempting to laugh this off I failed. The globus hystericus interfered. My throat felt sticky.
“Get in, Charlie.”
Again I sat in the crimson bucket seat (the supple fragrant leather kept reminding me of blood, pulmonary blood) and fumbled for the seat belt—you never can find those cursed buckles.
“Don’t fuck with the belt, we’re not going that far.”
Out of this information I drew what relief I could. We were on Michigan Boulevard, heading south. We drew up beside a skyscraper under construction, a headless trunk swooping up, swarming with lights. Below the early darkness now closing with December speed over the glistening west, the sun like a bristling fox jumped beneath the horizon. Nothing but a scarlet afterglow remained. I saw it between the El pillars. As the tremendous trusses of the unfinished skyscraper turned black, the hollow interior filled with thousands of electric points resembling champagne bubbles. The completed building would never be so beautiful as this. We got out, slamming the car doors, and I followed Cantabile over some plank-bedding laid down for the trucks. He seemed to know his way around. Maybe he had clients among the hard-hats. If he was in the juice racket. Then again if he was a usurer he wouldn’t come here after dark and risk getting pushed from a beam by one of these tough guys. They must be reckless. They drink and spend recklessly enough. I like the way these steeplejacks paint the names of their girlfriends on inaccessible girders. From below you often see DONNA or SUE. I suppose they bring the ladies on Sunday to point to their love-offerings eight hundred feet up. They fall to death now and then. Anyway Cantabile had brought his own hard hats. We put them on. Everything was prearranged. He said he was related by blood to some of the supervisory personnel. He also mentioned that he did lots of business hereabouts. He said he had connections with the contractor and the architect. He told me things much faster than I could discount them. However, we rose in one of the big open elevators, up, up.
How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, appreciation, glee—yes I appreciated his ingenuity. It seemed to me, however, that we were rising too high, too far. Where were we? Which button had he pressed? By daylight I had often admired the mantis-like groups of cranes, tipped with orange paint. The tiny bulbs, which seemed so dense from below, were sparsely strung through. I don’t know how far we actually went, but it was far enough. We had as much light about us as the time of day had left to give, steely and freezing, keen, with the wind ringing in the empty squares of wound-colored rust and beating against the hanging canvases. On the east, violently rigid was the water, icy, scratched, like a plateau of solid stone, and the other way was a tremendous effusion of low-lying color, the last glow, the contribution of industrial poisons