The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [185]
to get our demands." "He's a pretty tough character." "Now when I have the shop ready to go, you ask Mr. Ackey for a few minutes so we can talk to him." "We can arrange it," I said, who didn't know Ackey well enough to say good day when passing in and out of the toilet. But I represented him. The situation was different in the hash-houses. I was more trusted and highly regarded. In the kitchens were old men--flophouse. County Hospital, and mission attendance inscribed all over them big and bold, and there was nothing like the resentment of a fellow like Dawson in that striped shirt, who was close enough to Karas's condition to figure how he made profit, to hate and envy, and also to wish to be nifty at (he track, to wear hound's-tooth checks, to have a case and binoculars and be seen with a proud-cheeked fine big broad. But take one of these old guys from a Van Buren Street greasy-spoon --I'd be requested by him to come around by the alley, the large paving stones breathing fumes of piss, and signal him through the window. Whereupon he'd go tight with caution and make me an oblique response with his head that might be taken by other eyes as a random motion. At last, by the door, we'd have a shushing conversation that we could have had just as well after hours. Except that he would want me to have a look at his place of work probably. The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening; also that terrible state of food when you suspect it of approaching garbage that he brought out in his clothes and on all his person, his breath and the hair of his head just below me. Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning. And did it matter to him as it did to Dawson whether I looked like the organizer of his dreams? He wanted to make his dim contribution to the righting of wrongs, so that it was enough for him that he could locate me in an office or that I would come down this reeking alley to talk to him and accept the lists he slipped me of other stiffs who wanted to belong to the union. I was supposed to hunt them up in their moldy rooms. Where I had been on altogether different errands while I worked for Simon, recruiting coal hikers. No use assuming that I had reversed all and was now entering these flophouse doors from the side of light, formerly from that of darkness. Those times that I thought clearly of my duties I decided that I couldn't consider persons so much but rather the one degree of advancement in which everybody could be included. Having a call in the old neighborhood one morning, I dropped in on Einhorn and found him in his sunny parlor office, in that peculiar, familiar staleness of coffee and bed, papers, his own shaving lotions and the powders of the two women. Mildred with her orthopedic shoes --she was polite but didn't like me--was already at her machine, heated and lit on the back of the neck, which had just been shaved up to the border where her potent hair began. Over the way, empty, were the windows of the old place of great days and grands cir Constances. I didn't find Einhom in a good state though I wasn't supposed to know it from his weighty face. For a while I thought he wanted to sit me out silently, until I went away. He breathed and felt of himself, looked out in the morning, smoked, nibbled, croaked off some shallow gas. He appeared melancholy and even savage. "How's the pay at this new job of yours?" he asked me, deciding to speak. "Fair?" "It's liberal." "Then there's good coming out of it," he said with his dry decisiveness. I laughed at him. "Is that all you think?" "At least that anyway. Kid, I don't want to take away your zeal if you think you're doing something. And remember, I'm no conservative. Just because 1 sit here in a chair. This is no rich guys' club. In fact I have less to lose than other men, so I don't shrink from thinking to the extreme. I do a little business with Karas, but it doesn't follow that my ideas have to be where my interests are. What interests! Some interests!