The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [306]
Basteshaw." "He dabbled in real estate. He was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupngreens King." "That's not what Commissioner Einhorn called him." "What was that?" It was too late now to back out, and so I said, "He nicknamed him Butcher-Paper." Basteshaw laughed. He had broad teeth. "That's great!" he said. Imagine! Over this trouble, solitude, danger, heartbreak of the disaster, there blows suddenly home-town familiarity, and even a faux pas about the nickname. He didn't respect his old father. I didn't approve of that. Respect? Why, it came out how he downright hated him. He was glad he was dead. I'm willing to believe old Basteshaw was a tyrant, a miser, a terrible man. Nevertheless he was the fellow's father. In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in. The days were sultry. We sat under the crust of the canvas, in the patch of shade. There was scarcely any wind for the first few days, which was lucky. I tried to master my anxious mind, which kept asking whether I'd ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhom, Clem. I kept the smudgepot and flares by me, dry. Our chances of being picked up were not bad in these parts. It wasn't as though we had gone down in the extreme south where there wasn't much shipping then. As the heat fanned over you, you sometimes heard the actual salt in the water, like rustling, or like a brittle snow when it starts to melt. Basteshaw was forever watching me through those goggles. Even during a nap he seemed to watch, his head backed off, studious, vigilant. Cousin Anna Coblin didn't look more persistently into mirrors. There he sat, with his thick chest interposed, ponderous. He was built like a horse, this Basteshaw. As if hoofs, not hands, were on his knees. If he had hit back at me that first night there'd have been real trouble. But then we were both too weak to fight. And now he seemed to have forgotten all about it. His poise was that of a human fortress, and you could never catch him off balance. He often laughed. But while the sounds of his laughter went out into the spaces of the sea his eyes, blue and small, never lost sight of me through the goggles. "One thing I'm glad of," he said, "is that I didn't meet my end by drowning. Not yet, anyway. I'd rather die of hunger, exposure, anything else. My dad, you see, drowned in the lake." "Did he?" Ah, then, farewell Butcher-Paper. This was when I learned of his death. "At Montrose Beach during his vacation. Busy men often die on their holiday, as if they had no time for it during the business week. Relaxation kills them. He had a heart attack." "But I thought he drowned?" "He fell in the water and was drowned. Early in the morning. He was sitting on the pier, reading the Trib. He always got up before dawn, from years in the market. The coronary was slight and wouldn't have been fatal. It was the water in his lungs." Basteshaw, I discovered, loved medical and all scientific conversation of any sort. "The guards found him when they came on duty. The afternoon papers carried a story of foul play. There was a wad of money in his pocket, big thick rings on his fingers. That infuriated me. I went down to Brisbane Street to give them a piece of my mind. I thought it was scandalous. Trading on people's emotions like that. There was poor Ma, horrified. Murder? I forced them to print a retraction." I know those small paragraphs of retraction on page thirty, in tiny print. However, Basteshaw announced it with real pride. He put on his old man's best Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man never would let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch. The late Butcher-Paper had had a thing about breakage. When he had a violent fit and was about to smash something, Mrs. Basteshaw would cry, "Aaron, Aaron, the drawer!" Old pie tins were kept in a kitchen drawer for him that he could fling