The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [144]
land boom; and about his love affair with a Turkish woman who wouldn't let him out of the house; and his account of his first dose, when he said, "It was like getting into a can of hot angleworms." This change from great laughter to savagery made Happy ready to quit, his big, skillful, poachy eyes morose, warn226 o filling up, as I tried to iron things out. For it was up to me to bring hack. the peace. "I never took no shit in bigger concerns," said Happy from the corner of his mouth to me, but that Simon should hear. I knew that Simon had a strongly beating heart by the way his head hune downward, his mouth open on that still unmended front tooth, and that his craving which he would of necessity fight off was to take Happy by the seat of the pants and throw him into the street. At last Simon said, "Okay, I want to say I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous today. You ought to realize. Happy..." Thought of the Magnuses had overcome him, and a horror of so far forgetting that he was a young man in business and Happy merely a drip as to get himself towering about this nonsense. Simon's patience and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance--that shabby compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point. "Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind of we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids and a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness. I went with Happy, who drove. His fear in the Bohunk streets was that he would run over a kid and a crowd would tear him to pieces in its rage. "If it's their kids anything happens to, then look out, even if it s not your fault, the way they chase around." So he was always somewhat m this terror and wouldn't let me have the wheel, who didn't read this enough to be vigilant. We took the coal-and-ice dealers into averns a Dd drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark w ^eat Joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, uhdiagnosed wrong. If you thought toward something outside, it might be Padilla theorizing on the size of the universe; his scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. But in such places the slow hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop and star to star, you could pray the non-human universe was not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that happened to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois. Such a consideration never would trouble Simon. Whatever the place was, he would make it pay off, the only relation with it that concerned him; it had dollars, as the rock water, as the waste-looking mountain is made to spit its oil or iron, where otherwise human beings would have no wish to go, the barrens, the Newfoundlands, the scaly earths and the Antarctic snow blackened with the smoke of fuel tapped in Texas or Persia. Hrapek, Drodz, Matuczynski these dealers were called;