Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) - William Kennedy [4]
“A coward. He’ll cower up. You know what a coward is? He’ll run.”
“No, that word I don’t know. Francis is no coward. He’ll fight anybody. Listen, you know what I like?”
“What do you like?”
“Honesty,” Francis said.
“That’s another one,” Rudy said.
At Shaker Road they walked up to North Pearl Street and headed north on Pearl. Where they live now. They’d painted Sacred Heart Church since he last saw it, and across the street School 20 had new tennis courts. Whole lot of houses here he never saw, new since ‘16. This is the block they live in. What Billy said. When Francis last walked this street it wasn’t much more than a cow pasture. Old man Rooney’s cows would break the fence and roam loose, dirtyin’ the streets and sidewalks. You got to put a stop to this, Judge Ronan told Rooney. What is it you want me to do, Rooney asked the judge, put diapers on ‘em?
They walked on to the end of North Pearl Street, where it entered Menands, and turned down to where it linked with Broadway. They walked past the place where the old Bull’s Head Tavern used to be. Francis was a kid when he saw Gus Ruhlan come out of the corner in bare knuckles. The bum he was fighting stuck out a hand to shake, Gus give him a shot and that was all she wrote. Katie bar the door. Too wet to plow. Honesty. They walked past Hawkins Stadium, hell of a big place now, about where Chadwick Park was when Francis played ball. He remembered when it was a pasture. Hit a ball right and it’d roll forever, right into the weeds. Bow-Wow Buckley’d be after it and he’d find it right away, a wizard. Bow-Wow kept half a dozen spare balls in the weeds for emergencies like that. Then he’d throw the runner out at third on a sure home run and he’d brag about his fielding. Honesty. BowWow is dead. Worked on an ice wagon and punched his own horse and it stomped him, was that it? Nah. That’s nuts. Who’d punch a horse?
“Hey,” Rudy said, “wasn’t you with a woman the other night I saw you?”
“What woman?”
“I don’t know. Helen. Yeah, you called her Helen.”
“Helen. You can’t keep track of where she is.”
“What’d she do, run off with a banker?”
“She didn’t run off.”
“Then where is she?”
“Who knows? She comes, she goes. I don’t keep tabs.”
“You got a million of ‘em.”
“More where she came from.”
“They’re all crazy to meet you.”
“My socks is what gets ‘em.”
Francis lifted his trousers to reveal his socks, one green, one blue.
“A reg’lar man about town,” Rudy said.
Francis dropped his pantlegs and walked on, and Rudy said, “Hey, what the hell was all that about the man from Mars last night? Everybody was talkin’ about it at the hospital. You hear about that stuff on the radio?”
“Oh yeah. They landed.”
“Who?”
“The Martians.”
“Where’d they land?”
“Someplace in Jersey.”
“What happened?”
“They didn’t like it no more’n I did.”
“No joke,” Rudy said. “I heard people saw them Martians comin’ and ran outa town, jumped outa windows, everything like that.”
“Good,” Francis said. “What they oughta do. Anybody sees a Martian oughta jump out two windows.”
“You don’t take things serious,” Rudy said. “You have a whatayacallit, a frivolous way about you.”
“A frivolous way? A frivolous way?”
“That’s what I said. A frivolous way.”
“What the hell’s that mean? You been readin’ again, you crazy kraut? I told you cuckoos like you shouldn’t go around readin’, callin’ people frivolous.”
“That ain’t no insult. Frivolous is a good word. A nice word.”
“Never mind words, there’s the cemetery.” And Francis pointed to the entrance-road gates. “I just thought of somethin’.”
“What?”
“That cemetery’s full of gravestones.”
“Right.”
“I never knew a bum yet had a gravestone.”
They walked up the long entrance road from Broadway to the cemetery proper. Francis sweet-talked the woman at the gatehouse and mentioned Marcus Gorman and introduced Rudy as a good worker like himself, ready to work. She said the truck’d be along and to just wait easy. Then he and Rudy rode up in the back of the truck and got busy with the dirt.
They rested when they’d filled in all the hollows of the graves, and by