The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [143]
wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended. He was a tio listo, a carnival type, a whorehouse visitor. His style was that of a hoofer in the lowest circuit, doing a little cane-swinging and heel-and-toe routine, singing, "I went to school with Maggie Murphy," and telling smokehouse stories while the goofy audience waited for the naked star to come out and begin the grinds. He had a repertory of harmless little jokes, dog yipes, mock farts; his best prank was to come up behind and seize you by the leg with a Pekinese snarl. By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons with him studying the business. Especially since I had heard him weeping in the can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down. Often I relieved Happy at lunch. He hopped a car down to Halsted Street because he detested walking. Coming back at two, he would shuffle off at the stop by the driveway, carrying his coat and straw skimmer, vest stuffed with cigarettes, pencils, and cards--he had his own business card: "Happy Kellerman representing March's Coal and Coke": a rooster chasing a frantic hen, with the line beneath, "/ mean business." Walking in, he tested the beam of the scale, put the Times in the stove, walked around the yard, and then, these being the dog days, great heat, we would sit where the coolness rose from the concrete pit of the scale. The office had the appearance of a squatter's s ack or end house of a Western street. Over the way was a stockyards H* 225 siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there. I had never seen them so domestic, going whither they list, walking by your feet without fear. Simon bought a pistol--"We need one anyhow," he said--and shot at them, but they only scattered to come back. They didn't even bother to dig holes, only scooped out shallow nesting places. There were a few sales. Happy entered them on the big yellow sheets; an elegant penman, boastful of his hand, he sat up on the high stool in his flat straw, feathering out the wide and thin strokes. This oldfashioned bookkeeping desk of a scratched yellow brought the writer's face to a tiny square of window over the scale, and at times I saw Simon there, making out checks in the wide triple checkbook. Writing checks had fascinated him at first. He had wormed out of me that I owed Padilla two bucks for the satisfaction of paying one of my debts with his signature. There was no such satisfaction now, as the figures of the balance took fewer spaces, and he thought of his last audaciousness in money when he had tried to grab a fast buck in order to marry Cissy. This time he believed his whole life was staked. He had not merely been shooting his mouth off the day he had come to tell me he was getting married about how earnest he was over money; it was now proved by the mental wounds of his face, the death of its color, and the near-insanity of his behavior. The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror. If I took so much time from my own enterprises of theft and reading to walk around this yard with him, hands in pockets, it wouldn't be enough to say it was from solicitude, it was downright fright. The loose way he handled the pistol shooting at the rats was ominous to me. And that he complained of seething in his head, saying, "My brains are going to boil out of my ears," I had to keep him from clouting Happy once when he misjudged the moment to grab Simon's leg with his yiping-dog prank. It was a near thing. And just a while ago he had been laughing with Happy at his stories of being a shill during the Florida