The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [160]
trustworthy; or to be a Jesuit of money; or to be self-made: that was one of his weakest ideas but it was also persistent. I said, "Oh, but you're not a Henry Ford. After all, you married a rich girl." "The question is," he said, "what you have to suffer to get money, how much effort there is in it. Not that you start with a nickel, like the Alger story"--I 248., I here remembered what a reader Simon had been--"and run it into a fortune. But if you get a stake, what you do with it, whether you plunge or not." But this was the discussion of theory, which became rarer between us. Mostly I had to see in his disgusted eyes what his theory was and how disadvantageously I fitted into it, where I trailed, lagged, and missed the mark. So those were evil days for me, in that particular field of feeling that had the shape of the yard, the forms of the fence, coal heaps, machinery, the window of the scale, and that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed. These things: and also the guys that worked, the guys that bought, the cops that came for theirs, the mechanics and the railroad agents, the salesmen, got into me. My head was full of things to remember; I must not quote a wrong price and stumble in arithmetic or any dealing. Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. "Brother! things must be bad for you," she said, "if that's all you can dream." I might have confessed even worse, if I'd cared to, since Simon had decided on the roughest treatment for me and sent me on errands not exactly for Hesperides apples. I had to fight with janitors about clinkers, soothe and bribe them, sweeten dealers. with beer, wrangle with claims agents about shrinkage, make complicated deposits in the pushing, barking crowd at the bank, everybody in a hurry and temper; I had furthermore to hunt up shovelers in flop. houses and court them in the Madison Street gutter when we were suddenly shorthanded. I had to go to the morgue to identify one found shot with our pay envelope empty in his shirt pocket. They lifted the bristling, creased wrap from him and I recognized him, his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists, feet out of shape, and crying something from the roof of his mouth, which I saw. "You know him?" "That's Ulace Padgett. He worked for us. What happened to him?" "Girl friend shot him, they say." He pointed out the wound in his breast. "Have they caught her?" 'Naw, they won't even look for her. They never do." S>imon had given me this mission because, he said, I was driving the car anyway, to take Lucy out, and might as well attend to it on the way "ome. I had to hurry and change, and I didn't have the time to wash any but the exposed dirt of face, neck, and ears. All over the rest of me was grit from the yard, up my heels and legs. Even in the corners of the eyes there were shadowed places I didn't get into. They widened out my look by darkness. I had no time to eat, even if I had enjoyed an appetite, for the morgue had taken long and Lucy was waiting. I drove faster than I had any business to, and had a near thing at Western Avenue and Diversey, a long, downhill skid that turned the Pontiac round so that I finished backwards, against a streetcar. The motorman had had a good forty yards to see me and was standing on a grade, under the railroad bridge. So I didn't hit hard. I smashed the rear lights but couldn't see much other damage, and was congratulated by that sudden gathering that always collects on such an occasion. I was told how lucky I was and laughed it all off, hopped back of the wheel again and continued. I got to the Magnuses' in marvelous spirits, in the black night of the drive and the snow head of the portico, confident and whistling, the keys melodious in the coat I tossed down on the bench in the hall. However, when Lucy's brother Sam gave me a drink I went back, infinitely quicker than the speed at which I had come, to the morgue--the