8

Years after being mustered out of the army, Daniel went on with his early morning barracks routine. He rose at dawn and took a cold sponge bath, letting the water dry on his flesh as he did vigorous setting-up exercises. He shaved with an old-fashioned straight razor, slapped a coarse smelling alcohol over the abrasions, and then prepared a breakfast of fried potatoes, side bacon, eggs sunny-side up, white toast with oleo, and unpotably strong black coffee. As if expecting military inspection in a tent somewhere in Louisiana, he would then work at polishing his shoes. They were already shined so excessively that Amos once saw his own yellow hair mirrored in the gleaming toe.

Seated at the kitchen table, and only a day or two after Maureen’s abortion, Amos waited as usual for Daniel Haws to “finish up” in his office-bedroom. Perhaps unaware his voice would carry all the way to where Daniel was, he muttered:

“What if I was to tell you, Mr. Haws, you were a constant sleepwalker and paid me a visit every night of the week?”

Daniel Haws had just finished going over his shoes with a large horse-hair brush, and his hands hung loosely over his knees. He sat immobile, having heard Amos perfectly well. Then he walked to the kitchen and stopped, staring in the general direction of his persecutor.

“What did I tell you about callin’ me Mister? And by the way, what was you hollering about to raise the dead in the middle of the night?” Daniel frowned deeply, as if he might begin to remember the night now too.

“You don’t aim to answer my question, so I don’t yours,” Amos replied sadly, wearily. He had planned the question about the sleepwalking, the plan had failed, but Daniel’s own question now reminded him too of something he had let slip from mind. During the night, after Daniel had paid his sleepwalking visit to his cot, he had had a bad dream and cried out, awakening himself.

“Your question don’t need no answer,” Amos heard Daniel’s voice droning on. “It’s a made-up question besides.”

“All right, Daniel, I hollered last night because I dreamed Mr. Masterson asked me to marry him.” Amos told the truth, but spoke lightly, as if he had invented the remark on the spot.

“That’s a crock of shit,” Daniel cried, affronted, even insulted. He turned from Amos as if a grave wrong had been done him. “You haven’t put your hand to a mop or broom around here for days,” he went on. “Look at the rooms. Filthy!”

But the landlord was unable to bring his usual severity into his voice this morning. Then remembering breakfast, Haws went to the stove, pulled forth the huge evil-colored fry pan, slapped six strips of bacon in it, and going to the windowsill picked up the carton of eggs.

“Why do you say things that don’t have no substance in fact or truth, telling me you dreamed that when you didn’t dream!” Daniel suddenly cried out. He picked up two eggs, held them in his right hand, carefully smelled them. “Why do you do it?” Daniel wheeled about, and advancing in Amos’s direction, came up close to him as if to smell whether he was fresh.

Coming within two inches of Amos, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and let the eggs drop from his hand to the floor. Swearing his stream of barracks’ oaths, Daniel rushed into the hall, procured a mop, and instead of delegating the task to Amos, went over the linoleum with violent frenzied swipes, howling against everyone and everybody, but somehow offering this time no hint of violence to his star boarder, who remained at the table, petrified.

At the end of his task, however, Daniel turned to Amos and said: “Don’t you ever mention again in earshot of me about anybody walkin’ in his fucking sleep, you hear?”

“Heard you, Daniel,” Amos replied, deathly pale.

He did not dare look at the landlord but knew that the glance the latter gave him was unendurably terrible.

Then in a bewilderingly calm voice, Daniel said: “Now I’ll fry us our breakfast.”

DANIEL HAWS’S LIFE had come to a full halt, almost an end, when he had been separated under obscure circumstances from the regular U. S. Army. Everything for him since then had been sleepwalking, in one form or another. It was army ceremonies and routine that he seemed to be re-enacting at many times of the day. Both Daniel and his roomers seemed to be under the distant but certain jurisdiction of the military, whose ceremonies and rituals reappeared at every moment of the day from breakfast to bedcheck.

The strictness of these rules and regulations had finally driven out all but a few “desperate cases,” such as Amos, and finally he was the only roomer to remain. None of Daniel’s tenants had interested him—indeed he hardly knew their names—until Amos. Unable to take his eyes off the boy’s face, he could not admit that the feeling which seized him was love—he regarded it as some physical illness at first. Indeed, from the first beginning and hint of his manhood he had always had girls, had passed for girl-crazy in his family, and had continued his fornications like a good soldier until the present with habitual tireless regularity. He could not feel he wanted the body of Amos (who was a thin boy, though his buttocks had beautiful shape), but he could not deny to himself in his hours of blinding self-revelation that he needed Amos, that it was Amos who dictated everything he felt and represented all he needed. That his whole being was now taken up with a mere boy was simply the last of the long series of disasters which had been his life.

The only things which had held him to life after his separation from service had been his army clothes, his barracks bag, his shoe brush, and his military routine, until Amos. Even now, alone with him in the empty rooms, he felt that they were in the army together, and that he was Amos’s sergeant.

But this morning the charge that he “sleepwalked” and had visited Amos’s room, came as a final unhinging of his self. Rushing out into the street, walking at a gait that was almost a run, he contemplated the thought that he might have “visited” Amos in the night. He remembered that he had had some trouble about sleepwalking in the army, and it had got on his record. Who knows, he thought, perhaps it was his sleepwalking which had spoiled his career in the army. Now Amos had brought all the old trouble up again. On that day Daniel walked until sunset, through long stretches of beautified forlorn park, past squatting spoiled Japanese pagodas, shadowed by Moorish apartments built for disappeared millionaires, over trampled peony beds. Ever a victim of melancholy, on this bleak fall day without the faintest trace of sun and under a water-blister sky, he reached the depths of his hell. And all the while only the remembrance of Amos’s fair face held him to even a breath of hope.

The scaffolding of his life was falling.

“I WONDERED WHEN you’d come,” was Eustace’s opening remark to Daniel, as he opened his door on the former corporal.

“Shit, Ace, I thought I’d surprise you,” Daniel Haws said.

“I wish somebody could,” Eustace grunted, and motioning for Daniel to follow him, walked out to the kitchen, picked up his spy glasses from the windowsill and began looking out listlessly at the inky black alleyway.

Daniel Haws, standing directly behind Eustace, with his hands behind his back in military stance, did not speak. This was his first visit here alone. At other times he had come with Maureen O’Dell, Amos, or someone else.

“Do you think we’ll get through the winter, Daniel?” Eustace inquired with dry meaning. He offered him a cubeb, but Daniel refused it.

“Go on, I think you’ll need it,” Eustace prompted.

Daniel refused again, then, fingers trembling, reached for one.

“I know why you’ve come, but don’t tell me yet.” Eustace lit his own cigarette, then seeing Daniel made no move to smoke his, blew out the match.

Putting his cubeb with some difficulty in his pants pocket, Daniel Haws picked up the spy glasses from the sill and looked out into the pitch dark.

“I can’t help it, Ace, if you’ve got second sight,” Daniel said, and laid down the glasses.

Taking out a pocket comb from his shirt, Eustace handed it to Daniel.

In sudden self-consciousness, Daniel touched his own hair, usually so perfectly groomed, now disheveled, combed it carefully, handed back the comb to Eustace.

“Let’s go back into the front room then,” Eustace said, jittery under his calm.

“Well, smarty, since you know why I’m here, tell me,” Daniel Haws finally began, looking at one end of his cubeb. He spoke after a silence of many minutes during which time Eustace had been studying a book in French, whose title naturally Daniel could not read.

Eustace slammed shut the book.

“You’re the father of Maureen O’Dell’s aborted son and you are in love with a faggot named Amos.”

Daniel Haws stood up, started to walk aimlessly in the direction of the corridor, down which Scintilla raced, then stopped and smoothed the hairs along the back of his neck. Eustace vociferated, “You have a pair of perfectly chiseled nates. I hope your cock is as well sculpt, and you can sell yourself till the conquerors come.”

“I couldn’t be in love with a man,” Daniel appealed to Eustace.

“What’s so special about you?” Ace wondered.

“I’ve never been, and I can’t be now.”

“You’ve never been, and you are. And Amos isn’t a man, he’s practically a child, and nearly as soft as a girl, discounting a few black-and-blue spots and cut mouth and shiner. And he’s yours . . .”

The color glowed under Daniel Haws’s deep tan.

“He’s sick with love for you.” Eustace half-closed his eyes like the medium. “So you’d better sop it up while it’s flowing because it won’t flow forever. No siree. A spring like that is soon dry.”

To Eustace Chisholm’s considerable astonishment—and he was seldom surprised—he heard weeping, and saw that the big “stand-up-fall-down” (as he called him) was weeping uncontrollably. Daniel dried his eyes, as one would expect, on his fist.

“It’s not worth bawling over, Daniel.” Eustace rose, something quieter in his voice. He picked up a cup of stale black chicory he had left from afternoon, tasted it, then almost gentle:

“You’re too old to be in love for the first time and that’s why it’s got you hard.”

“What do I do, Ace?” Daniel covered his eyes with his palms.

“Tell him you’re crazy about him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Let him tell you then.”

“If I had the money, I’d take him with me to some far-off place.”

Eustace Chisholm stared at Daniel, incredulous at having heard the last sentence, then, in exasperation, said: “You’re in the farthest away place in the world now, mate. You couldn’t get any farther away than where you’re living with Amos. You’re in the asshole of the universe and you don’t need to waste more than a half cent of shoeleather to get back. Go home and take him in your arms and tell him he’s all you’ve got. That’s what you are to him too, and you’d better hurry, for it won’t last for long for either of you, and so why spend any more of your time, his, or mine.”

Eustace went out of the room, passed into the dining alcove, and Daniel could hear him twanging on his Jew’s harp some dismal folk-song or perhaps hymn.

OUT IN THE street, Daniel Haws walked like a drunken man, now going fast, now slow, stopping to lean occasionally against a lamp post, not noticing or even seeing who passed. Home, he stood in the black kitchen without attempting to turn on the light, near the table at which he and Amos ate.

Then without warning a cry came from his lips. It was a sound that he had perhaps longed to utter since his earliest recollection, back to the time in the coal mines, back to his childhood with his mother and brothers, no, further back, before memory, the cry carried him.

Helpless, in some paralysis of will and mind, he heard Amos’s door open and heard with terror his hurrying approaching footsteps.

A violent wave of nausea came over him even before he saw Amos’s face illuminated by a flashlight at the kitchen threshold. His eye was caught by a tiny gold coin strung on a brass chain exposed on Amos’s throat where his shirt collar was open.

Hurrying past Amos to the toilet, he did not have time to close the door, but vomited horribly over the bowl, as if now he would part with his guts.

He had not heard Amos’s step following behind him, but he felt the boy’s cool hand on his forehead as he went on with his agony. When he had done, he raised his head with ponderous effort to look into Amos’s eyes.

Daniel Haws, too weak to turn, his mouth still stained from his exertions, stood rigid while Amos Ratcliffe, his own mouth level with his, kissed him deliberately and then, with still more deliberate grave ceremony, wiped his landlord’s lips with a cotton handkerchief.

“Leave me be now, Amos, for Christ’s sake,” Daniel muttered, and his knees buckling, he fell dead weight to the floor.