The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [159]
square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He laid open Guzynski's cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn, and I thought. Does it make him think he knows what he's doing if the guy bleeds? Now he let him go and with the pistol signed to the hikers to clear the scale platform, and their shovels began to scrape or gouge the dirty silence of Guzynski looking with loathing at his blood. He sprang into his truck, and I feared he would crash it into the gates, but he skidded into the snow mash of the street and the tracks caught his wheels and straightened him out in the traffic that took him up with it toward the sunless, faint direction. "Any odds he's going to the station to swear out a warrant?" said. Happy. I Simon, who had put down the gun, listened to him, and with a heavy breath he said, "Get me Nuzzo on the phone." He spoke to me, and it was in a fashion I had made up my mind to get used to and generally obeyed. He no longer looked up a number himself or did the dialing but took the instrument only when his party was already waiting. This time, however, I didn't stir. My arms were crossed and I held my place by the scale. He marked me down for this, grimly. Happy got the number for him. "Nuzzo!" said Simon. "This is March. How y'doin'? What? No, it's cold enough, I can't kick. Now listen, Nuzzo, we just had a little trouble "own here from a squarehead dealer who hit one of my men with a shovel. What? No, he was drunk as a lord, dumped his load on my scale and tied me up for an hour. Look, he's probably on his way to make a romplaint because I roughed him up. Take care of him for me, will you? Keep him in the clink till he cools off. Sure I will, I got witnesses. You tell him if he's thinking of laying for me after, you'll fix his clock good. What? He does bushel business down by that church on Twentyeighth. Do that for me, will you?" He did, and Guzynski was in the lockup several days. Next time I saw him he wasn't plotting any revenge. His scars were crusty yet when he came back still a customer, quiet, and I know that Simon was watching his eyes and would have acted on the least hint. But there was no trouble to hint. Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's people, had put a deep fright in him in their cellar below cellar, and gave him a Saturn's bite in the shoulder to show him how he could be picked up whole and eaten. He must even come back a customer. And Simon, too, knew how to put home the clincher, and at Christmas gave Guzynski a bottle of Gordon's Dry Gin and his wife a box of New Orleans pecan pralines in the form of a cotton bale. She said to him that it had done Guzynski good. "Of course," said Simon. "He's satisfied now. Because he knows where he stands. When he swung that shovel he didn't know and was trying to find out. Now he knows." For Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast--because of chicken-heartedness--I did. I should have quelled Guzynski's riot as soon as it broke. But I wasn't prompt, wasn't brave, didn't understand that Guzynski had to be pistolwhipped and thrown in jail if he wasn't to become a Steelkilt mutineer to buffalo all captains. The inference was clear that if I didn't make time with Lucy Magnus it was from these same shortcomings. If I became her husband in two-armed fact, the rest was merely a formality. But I didn't mount the step of power. I could have done so from love, but not to get to the objective. Thus things became more tough for me at the yard; Simon increased my hardships both for my good and because it didn't displease him to do it. At this time he couldn't say how many high things were suitable for him and was trying on guises. His last thoughts at breakfast sometimes were the next new policy, and this might be to devote himself absolutely to the bottom-most detail or fistful in a business that reckoned by tons; or, again, to skim in the big space of principle only and leave the details to subordinates--as he could do if they, and mainly I, were