There was the kind of heat where you lie on your back and don’t move—hardly breathe, even—and still you sweat. I was in my room just lying there, staring at the ceiling and listening to the old lady clanking pots and pans around out in the kitchen when the thing began to slip up on me again. It was like a pulse beating in my mind: Tonight, it said. Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.
Lying around doing nothing wasn’t any good.
I got up and walked to the dresser mirror and looked into it. I wanted to make sure I didn’t look sick or nervous or anything—I didn’t want to get the old lady upset. It was bad enough for her.
It seemed I looked a little bit older than 18 tonight, but maybe it was because I always tried to look tough and tense when I looked into a mirror and because I had a pretty heavy beard for my age; I’d started shaving when I was 15. But I didn’t look sick or nothing. I looked all right.
Out in the kitchen there was the smell of something baking. It smelled good, but at the same time it made me a little upset in the stomach. The old lady was hunkered in front of the oven and she was pulling a pie out of the thing. The crust was crinkled around the edges and nicely browned. She looked up at me and poked out her lower lip and blew at a wisp of hair over her sweat-beaded forehead.
“Apple, Davie,” she said. “It came out nice, too. Your favorite, a nice apple pie.”
“Hey, that’s swell,” I told her. I guess maybe I didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though, because she flashed me a funny look.
“You want to set the table, we’re ready to eat,” she said.
I got out the silver and stuff and set it around and sat down and she put a big dish of franks and beans on the table. I got a knot in my stomach, looking at them. I got kind of like a sore throat. I looked up at the dock and saw that it was 7:30. I didn’t mean to do that because I’d promised myself I wouldn’t look at any clocks, but I just sort of did without thinking.
Then I got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. I went over by the window in the living room and looked down onto the street. It was summer and still light out. The window was open, and I could hear as well as see the little kids playing stickball down on the street. They ran around like crazy down there and there didn’t seem to be any pattern to it but there was, of course. I knew that. I used to do it myself, over in the old neighborhood where we lived. Only remembering it, it seemed as though it wasn’t really me but somebody else way back then.
When I looked up, I saw Mary Polaff in a window across the street, leaning out and looking over here. She’s only a kid, but she’s got a shape on her already. I started to wave and yell something when I saw her quickly draw back out of the window. She thought I couldn’t see her and she turned and called to somebody back in the room behind her and then her fat old lady came over to her and the two of them stood back a little from the window, looking out over here, and they probably thought I couldn’t see them there, but I could.
I knew what they were staring at, what they were talking about. I shouldn’t have done it, but I got sore; you know how it comes over you quick and later you get ashamed but at the time you don’t even know it’s happening. I leaned out the window and I could feel veins bulging at my neck and temples.
I yelled: “What the hell are you peekin’ at, nosy? Go ahead and look! Take a good look, why don’t you?”
Then I pulled back in and turned around and the old lady had come out of the kitchen. She looked like she wanted to cry but couldn’t, and she said: “Davie! Please, Davie, please, darling!”
I turned away from her and stood there feeling dopey and weak with the anger gone out of me. She came over and put her arm around my shoulders. She said: “Come on out and eat, Davie. Please. We’ve got to keep control, son. Remember what we decided. We aren’t going to think about it. Please.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Only what the hell were they lookin’ at? Do I look like I’m different from anybody else, a freak or something?”
I pulled out from under her arm. I said: “I guess I ain’t hungry. I forgot to tell you, I had a hamburger late this afternoon, so I don’t want anything right now. I’ll see you later.”
I walked toward the door and she sounded sort of panicky as she called: “Where are you going, son? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Going for a walk, maybe. I don’t know.”
She didn’t say anything else, but I knew she wanted to. She wanted to ask me what about the movie we were going to see, the musical down at the Parkside, the nice dopey musical that wouldn’t have any crime stuff in it or anything, that she thought would be nice if we could see, but she didn’t do that.
I felt pretty sorry for the old lady. I felt lousy walking out on her, but she was going to get on my nerves bad if I stuck around and I’d end up saying something to hurt her. So I got out. Maybe I’d get a grip on myself later and come back. I didn’t know.
Outside on the street the heat was still coming up from the pavement and bouncing off the apartment houses even though the sun was almost gone down. I felt like I was going to suffocate. I walked fast away from the house, not looking at the people sitting out on the stoops. Some of the kids playing stickball yelled something at me but I didn’t hear what it was and I didn’t pay any attention.
After a while I was at the 181st Street IRT subway entrance and without thinking about it or why or where I was going, I went in and downstairs. It should have been cool down there, but it wasn’t. It was hotter than the street. I took a downtown express. Those big crazy overhead fans in the subway car whirled and made a wind that mussed your hair up and all and blew pieces of newspaper around, but they didn’t make you any cooler. I sat right under one. There was about a dozen people in the car with me. It seemed every time I looked at one of them, they were staring at me with a funny look but that wasn’t really so; I knew I just thought that.
When we got to Times Square, I got out and went upstairs. Broadway was jammed with people walking around, looking in windows and yammering at one another the way it always is on a hot summer night in New York. Up near the top of that screwy little triangle-shaped Times Tower building electric bulbs blinked out the time: 8:32 p.m.
I swore at the clock and at myself for looking at it and my throat began to hurt again. I couldn’t seem to swallow at all for a few moments.
The first bar I came to, I turned in. I started to go right out again when I saw it was mobbed with service guys, Army guys and sailors in summer whites and a couple of Air Force guys, but then I figured maybe it’d do me good to get into a fight. Maybe knocking the crap out of some guy or vice versa, would help. So I went in and pushed into the bar between a sailor whose whites were too tight across his big can and a stocky-looking paratrooper. I didn’t beg anybody’s pardon for crowding in. They both turned too quick and looked at me, but they didn’t say anything. They just made room for me.
The back-bar mirror had a fishnet draped across it, supposed to make the place look cooler or something and when you saw yourself through the holes in the net you looked at one feature at a time. I saw I had a pretty big nose and I had one eyebrow higher than the other. I always thought I looked like Jeff Chandler, a little, only I didn’t tonight. Not through that fishnet. I just looked like some ordinary jerk who was mad about something.
I had $3.50 in my pocket. I had a shot and a beer chaser and that was half a buck, so I knew I was good for seven rounds, anyhow.
It was a noisy place, with all the service guys talking it up and the juke box turned up loud so you could hear it out on the street and running without stopping. But nobody knew me here; nobody paid any attention. After a couple of drinks I got to kind of like it.
I didn’t hardly feel the first three drinks at all or at least I didn’t notice it, but then something happened, I knew I was getting a little tight. I don’t get a muscle on over nothing at all until I’m a little greased.
The big swabbie next to me asked the bartender what time it was, and the bartender turned and looked up at an electric clock on the wall down at the end of the bar. I hadn’t noticed it before. I hadn’t thought about the time since I’d come into the place; I swear I hadn’t. But now I looked up at the clock, too, and it was 9:30 already and now it was only an hour-and-a-half off and I guess suddenly realizing it was that close, I got kind of uncorked. I turned to the sailor.
“If the time means so much to you, why don’t you buy yourself a damned watch? They pay you in the Navy, don’t they?”
As soon as I said it I knew I was going to get broken in half. The guy was big enough to do that. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t that I was brave or tough or anything; it just didn’t seem to matter. But the Navy guy just turned around, looking kind of surprised. He said, quietly:
“You ought to take it easy, Mac. What’s eatin’ on you, anyhow?” He had one of those slow Southern accents.
I told him it wasn’t any of his business what was eating on me and he looked me over carefully and shook his head sadly and said it was too bad he had a date and he was so late already. I agreed with him, but he just looked back at the clock again and left the bar. I felt funny about that—kind of let-down, like; kind of disappointed. I looked both ways along the bar, waiting for somebody else to have something to say but nobody was paying any attention.
I had one more drink, and then a blowzy old blonde hustler came in with some guy who wasn’t so stiff he couldn’t navigate, but he must’ve been pretty well laced to be giving this bag any time at all. It was plain she was mining him and making time like anything. As soon as they got into a booth they started smooching it up. It was kind of disgusting at their age.
I was standing sideways to the bar, with my back turned to that clock at the other end, and I couldn’t help watching this pair. Then, I don’t know whether it was the drinks or what, but the blonde bindle began to look like my old lady. I mean like the old lady might look in a few years, maybe 10, if she dyed her hair. It was crazy and I don’t know what it was about the blonde that reminded me of the old lady because she didn’t really look like her, but it was something. It got me. It made me think about the old lady and what the hell good was I doing her or myself, even, laying one on like this, feeling sorry for myself. I thought that it still wasn’t too late to take her to the show.
So I left the place. It was dark out now—as dark as it ever gets in Times Square, that is—and a little cooler. You come out onto Broadway at night and it kind of shocks you no matter how used to it you are. There’s something about it. Like a world where nothing’s real and you forget everything except you want to have a big time, a hell of a time; and if you’re alone or even with some guys, you want a girl bad, real bad. It was like that with me, tonight.
It felt so good I walked down to 42nd and then up to 50th, stalling off going home for a while, and then walked over to Eighth Avenue to take the Independent subway up to Washington Heights.
That was a bad deal. Eight Avenue was empty and sad even though it, too, was all lit up. There’s something about Eighth Avenue; it’ll never get anywhere. In some other town it’d be the big deal, the Main Drag. But it’s too close to Times Square, here. It’s like a dirty, beat-up old floozy walking beside a pretty young showgirl and they’re both dressed the same, but that’s the end of it. It gave me the real glooms.
It made the thing I’d been trying not to think about all night, all day, begin to press on my mind again like a thumb in a wound. I couldn’t let it. Once I let go and really thought about it I wouldn’t be able to stop. I all at once felt all alone, walking along Eighth there, like that, and about four inches high and trembling scared and I had to do something fast. I went into another creep joint.
This one was bird. I hadn’t noticed the name of it but the minute I went in I knew it was called Paddy’s Shamrock Bar or something. It was one of those saloons that cater to professional Irishmen. They had a raft of crazy-shaped shillelaghs hanging back of the bar and some brown derbies and they still had dirty green bunting and decorations from St. Patrick’s Day draped across the mirror here in August, for crying out loud. But it wasn’t very crowded, and they had a big 30-inch TV set going, and I didn’t see any clock in the place. So I bellied up to the bar, like they say in the Westerns.
The TV had one of those situation-comedy things on, all about a dumb blonde and her roommate, only the blonde’s dumbness didn’t get on your nerves because she was kind of cute about it and what she had in front, it didn’t make much difference how dumb she was. It didn’t break me up or give me convulsions or anything, but it was something to watch that put you in a kind of vacuum, and the dozen or so Countycorkmen in the joint got such a root out of it, it was contagious. I even laughed, once.
I had two more boilermakers while this was on and was on the seventh, the last one I could pay for, when the thing ended. The stuff had taken hold by this time, too, though not as good as I wanted. All I had was a kind of loose, tingle-fingered, putty-like looseness all over, but everything was too sharply focused like in 3-D or something. I knew it was one of those times like I’d heard older guys talk about where no matter how much you lapped up, you didn’t get really drunk.
While I sipped the last drink the commercial came, and the guys at the bar stopped staring at the TV like they’d never seen one before and got back to doing some serious drinking and talking.
It was one of those places where everybody knew everybody else and calls them by the first name and everybody pleasantly insults everybody else and calls them gutter names and nobody gets sore. Nobody paid any attention to me. I began to feel like the invisible man from Mars. That was all right. That was about like I wanted it.
Then a big beetle-browed guy with a soup-bowl haircut that looked as if he gave it to himself and with his blue work shirt sleeves rolled up over arms that were big as my thighs, started shushing everybody, trying to stop the talk that had busted out along the bar.
As it quieted down I heard him say: “Shhhhh, shut up, now, and be listenin’ to the news. The news! The news!” He kept saying that one word over and over.
I looked up at the TV and there was a serious-faced college-grad type sitting behind a desk with a globe map on it and a can of motor oil and he was yakking at us with his very sincere, serious voice.
As though the big guy had waved a magic wand, everybody in the joint shut up now and went back to staring at the TV. I heard the newscaster say: “—but first, the eleven o’clock local news, straight from the wire services of the—”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. All I heard was somewhere in my mind, the guy’s voice saying over and over again, “The news! The news!” and the announcer’s voice saying, “the eleven o’clock...the eleven o’clock....the eleven o’clock…” like a record that had broke and stuck there.
Eleven o’clock. In another three minutes…
What I should have done was get out of there. I didn’t have to listen to the newscast. The part I didn’t want to hear would not come on until near the end, anyhow, maybe in a special bulletin or something, if they put it out over this one at all. I had plenty of time. I didn’t have to hear it. But I didn’t even think about that, then. I didn’t think about anything.
I kept looking at the newscaster’s sincere, serious face in closeup now, filling the whole screen and listening to the even, cultured tone of his voice and I could feel my fingers squeezing the heavy-bottomed shot glass on the bar in front of me until I thought I’d never get them unstuck.
I heard myself saying like it was somebody else, very loud, almost hysterical: “Shut it off! Shut that thing off!”
AH the heads along the bar swung around toward me as though they were on a wire. They looked at me like I’d suddenly cursed aloud in the middle of Mass. I didn’t care. That voice was going on and on and it was going to say something I didn’t want to hear.
“Are you going to shut that damn guy off?” I shouted.
They weren’t. I could tell. I knew. But I couldn’t let him keep talking up there. I probably couldn’t have done it again in a million years if I’d wanted to, if I tried, but this time it was easy. I picked up the shot glass. It was at least 40 feet down to that TV set and it was on a shelf 10 feet from the floor but I hit the screen dead center and the glass went right through the picture tube and one second there was this big bright shot of the newscaster and the sound of his voice and then there was nothing but some jagged glass in the front of the seat and the most silence you ever heard.
I saw the big shave-necked Irishman coming toward me. His face was the color of the bricks he probably laid all day and his eyes were too little and too bright, way back in his head. But I couldn’t seem to move.
“And why did you do that?” He sounded hurt. He didn’t sound mad at all. “Have you gone daft, boy? Why did you do that?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer even if I could have. He started slapping me, and I can’t stand anyone slapping me, and I guess that was when you could say I flipped a little. There was still some beer in my big glass, and it splashed back on me when I swung it off the bar and hit him in the forehead with it. It was good glass. It didn’t break even when it slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. Then I hit him in the belly with my fist.
The rest of it’s not too clear. It seemed like a hundred guys came at me all at once only it couldn’t have been because there was only a dozen or so in the place. And that was all right with me. I wanted them to. The bartender, who looked too fat to move if his pants were on fire, came over the bar like a gazelle. He had a big knobby-looking blackthorn shillelagh in his fist.
It was a ball for a while because they all tried to get to me at once and were like a herd of hogs trying to squeeze through a narrow gate. They were climbing all over each other to get to me, and I kept pumping punches fast as I could move my arms and I hit the first three flush in the face. I felt the gristle of somebody’s nose go. I felt the sickening shifting softness of an eyeball under my fist. Then something hit me in the cheek and it didn’t hurt too bad but it made my ears ache and somebody grabbed my arm and took it and twisted it some crazy way and I felt something snap and I screamed. Then it was like a brick wall falling down on me and wouldn’t ever stop, even after I was all covered with it so that I couldn’t see and everything was dark.
I was in an ambulance, only it took me awhile to figure that out, even though the sound of the whining siren was right in my ears and I saw two guys in white jackets and the cop, sitting across from me. My face didn’t feel like a face. It felt like one of those big throbbing, slithering masses of goo that comes out of the sea to invade the earth like in horror stories. I moved and that made my arm one big electric shock that hurt like hell. That reminded me.
I said: “What time is it?”
The cop and the two ambulance guys just sat there and looked at me. I had the crazy notion that they hadn’t heard me, that no matter how loud I talked they wouldn’t ever hear me; they’d just sit there like that forever, staring at me.
Then the baldheaded ambulance guy looked at a wrist-watch and said: “Eleven-twenty.” He had a funny voice, sort of thick and gargly.
I lay there and didn’t move any more on account of my arm and I began to think and now there didn’t seem to be any reason not to do that. What harm could it do, now? It was over. It was forever over and 17 minutes ago they’d shot the big juice through him and he’d jumped and strained against the strap like I’d heard that they do but the lights didn’t dim all over the place at the time because I’d heard that didn’t really happen anymore. And then maybe three, four or was it live minutes and he’d been still. He hadn’t moved any more.
Even though they’d had his head covered I could see what he looked like. He had that same expression on his face I’d seen once when I was about 10 and he took me on a hike over to the Palisades and a copperhead bit his leg. He sat right down and lit a match to my Boy Scout knife and after tying a handkerchief real tight above it, bled the wound. He was awful pale and looking the closest to crying I’d ever seen him but looking more mad than hurt and his big, even white teeth showing in a grin or a grimace or something.
That’s what he’d looked like tonight when they did that to him, I knew.
I don’t know how long I’d been crying before I realized it, but I was really tearing it off. Bawling like a baby. I thought: But it isn’t for you, up there, you hear that? I wouldn’t cry for you or be sorry for you for no money, because you stopped being my old man five years ago token you ran off with her and left me and the old lady. Because when we knew you weren’t coming back we agreed to pretend like you were dead and never talk about you and we did that; it wasn’t so hard after a while. And I ain’t crying for me and the old lady because we got along all right. We both work and we’ve done all right.
Only why did you have to catch the lousy little tramp with somebody else, finally, and kill her and make all that big stink in the newspapers and the trial and all and they had to execute you tonight at eleven-o-three? Pop, why did you have to do that?
And I thought: So to hell with you, it ain’t because of you I’m bawling, it’s because of this arm, the way it’s killing me, hurting. That’s all. You understand that?
Then I must have tried to get up because the two ambulance guys and cops pounced on me and held me down and one of them stuck a needle into my good arm and that was all I knew…
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: In hearing about executions, I’ve often considered how horrible it must be for someone near and dear to the doomed—figuring that everyone—even the most vicious killer, has had somebody who loved him—his mother, etc., etc. Yet this aspect of an execution has never been touched in newspapers or anywhere—so far as I know. The original title of the yarn, “Ricochet,” meant to bear out that theme—that an execution indirectly hits others than the actual victim.