Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) - William Kennedy [8]
Francis stopped crying and tried to suck a small piece of bread out from between the last two molars in his all but toothless mouth. He made a slurping sound with his tongue, and when he did, a squirrel scratching the earth for food to store up for the winter spiraled up the box elder in sudden fright. Francis took this as a signal to conclude his visit and he turned his gaze toward the sky. A vast stand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day. The breeze had grown temperate and the sun was rising to the noonday pitch. Francis was no longer chilly.
“Hey bum,” he called to Rudy. “Let’s find that truck driver.”
“Whatayou been up to?” Rudy asked. “You know somebody buried up there?”
“A little kid I used to know.”
“A kid? What’d he do, die young?”
“Pretty young.”
“What happened to him?”
“He fell.”
“He fell where?”
“He fell on the floor.”
“Hell, I fall on the floor about twice a day and I ain’t dead.”
“That’s what you think,” Francis said.
II
They rode the Albany-Troy-via-Watervliet bus downtown from the cemetery. Francis told Rudy: “Spend a dime, ya bum,” and they stepped up into the flat-faced, red-and-cream window box on wheels, streamline in design but without the spark of electric life, without the rockinghorse comfort, or the flair, or the verve, of the vanishing trolley. Francis remembered trolleys as intimately as he remembered the shape of his father’s face, for he had seen them at loving closeness through all his early years. Trolleys dominated his life the way trains had dominated his father’s. He had worked on them at the North Albany carbarns for years, could take them apart in the dark. He’d even killed a man over them in 1901 during the trolley strike. Terrific machines, but now they’re goin’.
“Where we headed?” Rudy asked.
“What do you care where we’re headed? You got an appointment? You got tickets for the opera?”
“No, I just like to know where I’m goin’.”
“You ain’t knowed where you was goin’ for twenty years.”
“You got somethin’ there,” Rudy said.
“We’re goin’ to the mission, see what’s happenin’, see if anybody knows where Helen is.”
“What’s Helen’s name?”
“Helen.”
“I mean her other name.”
“Whatayou want to know for?”
“I like to know people’s names.”
“She ain’t got only one name.”
“Okay, you don’t want to tell me, it’s all right.”
“You goddamn right it’s all right.”
“We gonna eat at the mission? I’m hungry.”
“We could eat, why not? We’re sober, so he’ll let us in, the bastard. I ate there the other night, had a bowl of soup because I was starvin’. But god it was sour. Them driedout bums that live there, they sit down and eat like fuckin’ pigs, and everything that’s left they throw in the pot and give it to you. Slop.”
“He puts out a good meal, though.”
“He does in a pig’s ass.”
“Wonderful.”
“Pig’s ass. And he won’t feed you till you listen to him preach. I watch the old bums sittin’ there and I wonder about them. What are you all doin’, sittin’ through his bullshit? But they’s all tired and old, they’s all drunks. They don’t believe in nothin’. They’s just hungry.”
“I believe in somethin’,” Rudy said. “I’m a Catholic.”
“Well so am I. What the hell has that got to do with it?”
The bus rolled south on Broadway following the old trolley tracks, down through Menands and into North Albany, past Simmons Machine, the Albany Felt Mill, the Bond Bakery, the Eastern Tablet Company, the Albany Paper Works. And then the bus stopped at North Third Street to pick up a passenger and Francis looked out the window