The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [48]
what Simon was up to these days. He didn't tell me, nor did he seem curious as to what was happening to me, having decided in his mind that I was nothing but a handyman at Einhorn's. Once I went with Dingbat to a party one of his fiancees was giving, and I met my brother with a Polish girl in a fur-trimmed orange dress; he wore a big, smooth, check suit and looked handsome and sufficient to himself. He didn't stay long, and I had a feeling that he didn't want to spend his evenings where I did. Or maybe it was the kind of evening Dingbat made of it that didn't please him, Dingbat's recitations and hoarse parodies, his turkey girding and obscene cackles that made the girls scream. There were several months when Dingbat and I were very thick. At parties I horsed around with him, goofy, his straight man; Or I hugged and pitched on the porches and in the backyards with girls, exactly as he did. He took me under his protection in the poolroom, and we did some friendly boxing, at which I was never much good, and played snooker--a little better--and hung about there with the hoods and loudmouths. So that Grandma Lausch would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too light, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, spat-down pollyseed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air. Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves, stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers, punks with ambition to become torpedoes, neighborhood cowboys with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates, tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs, ex-servicemen, home-evading husbands, hackies, truckers and bushleague athletes. Whenever-someone had a notion to work out on me-- and there were plenty of touchy characters here to catch your eye in a misconstrued way--Dingbat flew around to protect me. "This kid is a buddy of mine and he works for my bro. Monkey with him and you'll get something broke on your head. What's the matter, you tough or hungry!" He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down sharply; his furrowed chin was already feeling toward its fighting position on the shoulder of his starched shirt, prepared to go into his stamping dance and start slugging. But there weren't any fights over me. If there was one doctrine of Grandma Lausch's that went home, it was the one of the soft answer, though with her this was of tactical not merciful origin, the dust-off for heathen, stupes, and bruteheads. So I don't claim it was a trained spirit turning aside wrath, or integer vitae (how could I?) making the wolves respect me; but I didn't have any taste for the perpetual danger-sign, sye-narrowing, tricky Tybalt all coiled up to stab, for that code, and was without curiosity for what it was like to hit and so I refused all the bids to outface or be outfaced. On this I had Einhom's views also, whose favorite example was his sitting in the driver's seat of the Stutz--as he sometimes did, having been moved over to watch tennis matches or sandlot games--and a coal heaver running up with a tire tool because he had honked once or twice 101 the Stutz to move and Dingbat wasn't there to move it. "What could. I do," said Einhorn, "if he asked me no questions but started to swing or punch me in the face? With my hands on the wheel, he'd think I was the driver. I'd have to talk fast. Could I talk fast enough? What could make an impression on an animal like that? Would I pretend to faint or play dead? Oh my God! Even before I was sick, and I was a pretty husky young fellow, I'd do anything possible before I started to trade punches with any sonofabitch, muscle-minded ape or bad character looking for