The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [136]
The kids have gang fights with stones and sticks and knuckle-bands; in the winter the snowballs are packed with rocks. It is of course harmless, a mere tapping of the healthycompetitiveinstinct.
Hey, Gallagheh, Lefty Finkelstein's gang is gonna fight us.
Sonsofbitches, let's get them. (Fear is something alien to the gang, stored far down in his stomach.) I been layin' for him.
Get Packy and Al and Fingers, we're gonna clean up the Yids.
What time we staat?
What the fug you caaeh? Ya yella?
Who's yella. I'm gonna get me my bat.
(On the way he passes a synagogue. "Ya yella?" He spits on it.) Hey, Whitey, I'm givin' it one for good luck.
Hey, Gallagheh, the kids yell.
Watch out for your old man when he's got a bag on.
In the house his mother winces at sounds and walks on tiptoe. His old man sits at the round table in the living-dining room, and grabs the yellow lace cover and crushes it in his big mitts. Then he spreads it out on the table again.
Goddam, sure a man has. . . Sonofabitch. Hey, PEG!
What is it, Will?
His father massages his nose and chin. Cut out the goddam mousing around, walk like a woman goddammit.
Yes, Will?
That's all goddammit, get away.
When your old man's as big a sonofabitch as Will Gallagher, you leave him alone when he's got a bag on. But you watch him so one of his mitts don't catch you on the side of the mouth.
He sits stolid by the round table, and beats his fist down once or twice. He looks at the walls. (The brown pictures which once were green of shepherd girls in a wooded valley. They came off a calendar.) GODDAM PLACE.
The triptych on the whatnot shudders as he bangs the table. Will, don't drink so much.
SHUT UP! Shut your stupid mouth. He lumbers to his feet and staggers to the wall. The glass over the shepherd girl splatters as he throws it to the floor. He sprawls on the shabby gray-brown sofa, looks at the gray shiny nap of the carpet where it has worn through. Work your ass off, FOR WHAT?
His wife tries to slip the bottle off the table. LEAVE IT THERE! Will, maybe you can get something else.
Yeah. . . yeah. Have you whining I need a little this, a little that. Grocers butchers. Just let me break me back wrestling that truck around. Something ELSE. I'm stuck, I'm in a hole. GET THAT BOTTLE DOWN.
He stands up, lurches toward her, and strikes her. She slips to the floor and lies there without moving, uttering a dull passionless whimpering. (A slim woman, drab now.)
CUT OUT THE GODDAM NOISE! He looks at her dumbly, mops his nose again and rumbles toward the door. Get out of the way, Roy. At the door he stumbles, sighs, and then goes pitching down the street into the night.
Gallagher looks at his mother. He is empty, close to weeping. Here, Ma. He helps her up. She begins to cry loudly, and numbly he supports her.
Ya keep your mouth shut when the old man's got a bag on, he thinks.
Later, he goes up to his room, and reads a book he drew from the library. King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Boy-wise, he dreams of women in. . . lavender dresses he picks.
I ain't gonna be like the old man. (He shall defend his wife with his sword.)
The bright glorious passage of youth.
His teachers never remember him in high school, a sullen morose student without enthusiasm. He quits a year before graduation, out into the tag end of the depression and a job as an elevator boy. His old man is without work that year, and his mother goes out by day, cleans stucco, Spanish tile, and Colonial houses in Brookline, in Newton. At night she goes to sleep after supper, and his old man is down at the corner bar, waiting for someone to offer him an argument or a drink.
Roy starts hanging around the Democratic