The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [232]
Eugene slowed his step obediently here; at the jobbing butcher's he was habitually caught. Without warning red and white beeves were volleyed across the sidewalk on hooks, out of a van. The butchers, stepped outside for a moment in their bloody aprons, made a pause for ladies sometimes, but never for men. The beeves were moving across, all right, and on the other side a tramp leaned on a cane to watch, leering like a dandy at each one of the carcasses as it went by; it could have been some haughty and spurning woman he kept catching like that.
At the go-ahead from the butcher, made with a knife, Eugene took one step, but stopped suddenly. It was out of the question—that was all of a sudden beautifully clear—that he should go to work that day.
And things were a great deal more serious than he had thought.
Delicately and slowly as if he had been dared, Eugene felt with his hand under his raincoat, touching coat and vest and silver pencil. He clung to one small revelation: that today he was not able to take those watches apart.
He had only reached California Street. He stood without moving at the brink of the great steepness, looking down. He had struck Emma and when he struck, her face had met his blow with blankness, a wide-open eye. It had been like kissing the cheek of the dead.
She could still bite his finger, couldn't she? and some mischievous, teasing spirit looked at him, mouthing joy before darting ahead. But he looked down at the steepness, shocked and almost numb. A passerby gave him a silent margin. The slap had been like kissing the cheek of the dead.
What would Mr. Bertsinger Senior, down at the shop, have to say about this, Eugene wondered, what lengthy thing? His watch opened in the palm of his hand, and then he was walking on again with protest and speed down the hill, the street like the sag of a rope that disappeared into fog. The world was the old man's subject, but he knew yours.
II
Below in Market Street the fog ran high overhead and the bustle of life was revealed. Eugene could imitate his hurry. Could it seem at all sad or absurd to the others, he wondered—with his head seeming to float above his long steps—that Market had with the years become a street of trusses, pads, braces, false bosoms, false teeth, and glass eyes? And of course of jewelry stores. He passed the health food store where the shark liver oil pellets were displayed (really attractively, to tell the truth) on a paper lacy as a Valentine. How amazing it all was. Wasn't it? A sailor in the penny arcade was having his girl photographed in the arms of a stuffed gorilla. Eugene would like to show that to somebody.
He read the second story level of signs across the street, Joltz Nature System, Honest John Trusses, No Toothless Days. A lady carrying a streetcar transfer slip and a bunch of daisies wrapped in newspaper was coming down the stairs from the No Toothless Days door; would she dare smile, supposing she heard of a little joke, horseplay, would there be any use in telling her?
In the flyblown window of a bookstore a dark photograph that looked at first glance like Emma (Emma, he could bet, still sat on at the table composing herself, as carefully as if she had been up to the ceiling and back) was, he read below, Madame Blavatsky. Every other store on Market Street was, pursuing some necessity, a jewelry store; so that if you wore a Strictform No Give Brace you could wear at the same time a butterfly breast pin or a Joy watch band, "Nothing but Gold to Touch the Flesh." It could all make a man feel shame. The kind of shame one had to jump up in the air, kick his heels, to express—whirl around!
Just on the other side of Bertsingers' there was a crowded market. Eugene could hear all day as he worked at his meticulous watches the glad mallet of the man who cracked the crabs. He could hear it more plainly now, mixed with