The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [54]
save four bucks." He listened, however, to the noise against him, startled in the eyes, and plunged out with more spirit the second round, carrying the fight to Jaworski, reckless, with slum motions of deadliness in his giant white knots. But in the third round he was hit where he could least stand a blow, in the belly, and he went deadweight flat, counted out in a terror of roars and barks, accusations of dive-taking and fixed fight, with Dingbat mounted on the first rope and flapping his hat at the referee, who made a headstall of his hands and covered his ears. Nails came doubled out of the ring, dead-eyed in the white electric brilliance and with a wet moss of whiskers on the stony sponge of his cheeks. I helped him dress and took him back to the YMCA, where I got him into bed and locked him in the room, then waited in the street for Dingbat so that he wouldn't go and kick at his door. But he was too glum and droopy for that. He and I took a walk together and bought lard-fried potatoes at a street wagon, and then turned in. In the morning we had to cash in our return tickets to pay the hotel bill, for Dingbat had counted on a purse and was flat broke. We hitched rides toward Chicago and spent a night on the beach at Harbert, a little way out of St. Joe, Nails wrapped in his robe and Dingbat and I sharing a slicker. We went through Gary and Hammond that day, on a trailer from Flint, by docks and dumps of sulphur and coal, and flames seen by their heat, not light, in the space of noon air among the black, huge Pasiphae cows and other columnar animals, headless, rolling a rust of smoke and connected in an enormous statuary of hearths and mills--here and there an old boiler or a hill of cinders in the bulrush spawning-holes of frogs. If you've seen a winter London open thundering mouth in its awful last minutes of river light or have come with cold clanks from the Alps into Torino in December white steam then you've known like greatness of place. Thirty crowded miles on oilspotted road, where the furnace, gas, and machine volcanoes cooked the Empedocles fundamentals into pig iron, girders, and rails; another ten miles of loose city, five of tight--the tenements--and we got off the trailer not far from the Loop and went into Thompson's for a stew and spaghetti meal, near the Detective Bureau and in the midst of the movie-distributors' district of great posters. There was nobody much interested in our return. For there had been a fire at Einhom's meanwhile. It destroyed the living room--big reeking black holes in the mohair, the oriental rug ruined, and the mahogany library table and the set of Harvard Classics on it scorched and soaked by the extinguishers. Einhom had filed claim for two thousand dollars; the inspector didn't agree that the cause of the fire was a short-circuit but hinted it had been set, and there was opinion heard that he wanted to be paid off. Bavatsky wasn't around; I had to take on part of his duties for a while but had better sense than to ask about him, knowing he must be in hiding. The day the fire broke out Tillie Einhom had been visiting her cousin-in-law and Jimmy Klein had taken the sick Commissioner to the park. The Commissioner looked vexed about it. His bedroom was off the parlor, where the smell lasted for weeks, and he lay with silent frowns, condemning his son's way of doing business. Tillie had been asking for a new suite, so he had it in for her too-- furniture-insatiable women and their nest-windmg thoughts. "Wouldn't I give you the five, six hundred dollars you'll chisel out of the company," the Commissioner said to his son, "so I wouldn't have to smell this ipisch in my last days? Willie, you knew I was sick." This was certainly true. Beaky, white, and solemn, Einhom took the rebuke as deserved, filially, from the Commissioner risen out of bed, in his long underwear and his open, brocaded, heel-touching dressing gown, standing enfeebled in the kitchen and refusing the natural support of the back of a chair, independent. "Yes, Dad," Einhom answered, the sense of a bad piece of work settled