returned, and it was stronger this time.
Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with an expression I’d never expected to see on his honest, open face: sulky
irritation mixed with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a windbag uncle who’s told all his stories, even
the boring ones, three or four times.
`Àin’t you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? We’re rich! My mom ain’t going to have to press shirts for that
damned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain’t going to have to sell papers on the corner anymore, shiverin when it rains in
the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder’s. I can quit actin like I died and went
to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.”
I started a little at that, but what the hell–I wasn’t a nickel man. I left Peoria seven cents, day in and day out. Unless I
was too broke to afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional stony stretch comes with the territory.
“Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie’s and have a cup of java,” I said. “Talk this thing over.”
“Can’t. It’s closed.”
“Blondie’s? The hell you say!”
But Peoria couldn’t be bothered with such mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the street. “You ain’t heard the best, Mr.
Umney! My Uncle Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco–a specialist–who thinks he can do something about my eyes.”
He turned his face up to mine. Below the cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips were trembling. “He says it might not
be the optic nerves after all, and if it’s not, there’s an operation . . . I don’t understand all the technical stuff, but I could
see again, Mr. Umney!” He reached out for me blindly . . . well, of course he did.
How else could he reach out? `Ì
could see again!”
He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands and squeezed them briefly before pushing them gently away. There was ink
on his fingers, and I’d been feeling so good when I got up that I’d put on my new chalk worsted. Hot for summer, of
course, but the whole city is air- conditioned these days, and besides, I was feeling naturally cool. I didn’t feel so cool
now. Peoria was looking up at me, his thin and somehow perfect newsboy’s face
troubled. A little breeze–scented
with oleander and exhaust–ruffled his cowlick, and I realized that I could see it because he wasn’t wearing his tweed
cap. He looked somehow naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy should wear a
tweed cap, just like every
shoeshine boy should wear a beanie cocked way back on his head.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought you’d be happy. Jeepers, I didn’t have to come out here to this lousy corner
today, you know, but I did–I even got here early, because I kinda had an idea you’d get here early. I thought you’d be
happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a chance at an operation, but you
ain’t.” Now his voice trembled with
resentment. “You ain’t!”
“Yes I am,” I said, and I wanted to be happy–part of me did, anyway–but the bitch of it was that he was mostly
right. Because it meant things would change, you see, and things weren’t supposed to change. Peoria Smith was
supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that perfect cap of his tilted back on hot days and pulled down low
on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to be smiling, was never supposed to
say “hell” or “frogging,” and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.
“You ain’t!” he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card- table over. It fell into the street, papers flapping
everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down to get it. I could see tears coming
out from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He
started groping for the cane, but it had