“My name’s Tobe Benson,” the small man said as they went up on the creaking porch.
“Rafe Taylor.”
They went inside and were met by a furnace blast of heat. The inside of the house was unbelievably filthy. Battered furniture sat in the small, linoleum-floored living room, and the stale wine reek was overwhelming. They went on through to the dining room, which seemed to be the central living area of the house. An old iron heating stove shimmered off heat that seemed nearly solid. The floor was sticky with spilled wine and food, and a yellow dog lay under the table, gnawing on a raw bone. Other bones lay in the corners of the room, the meat clinging to them black with age.
A large gray-haired man sat at the table with a bottle of wine in front of him. He wore dirty bib overalls and a stupefied expression. He looked up, smiling vaguely through his smudged glasses.
“That there’s Sam,” Tobe said in his foghorn voice. “Sam, this here’s Rafe. Lives across the street. Some little punk bastard just stole all his groceries. It’s a goddamn shame when a poor crippled fella like Rafe here ain’t safe from all the goddamn little thieves in this town.”
The man in the overalls smiled stupidly at Raphael, his eyes unfocused. “Hi, buddy,” he said, his voice tiny and squeaking.
“Sit down, Rafe,” Tobe said, and lurched across to a rumpled bed that sat against the wall opposite the table. He collapsed on the bed, picked up the wine bottle sitting on the floor near it, and took a long pull at it. “You want a drink?” he asked, offering the bottle.
“No. Thanks all the same.” Raphael was trying to think of a way to leave without aggravating the little man.
“Hi, buddy,” Sam said again, still smiling.
“Hi, Sam,” Raphael replied.
Tobe fished around in a water glass he used as an ashtray and found a partially burned cigarette. He straightened it out between his knobby fingers and lit it. Then he looked around the room. “Ain’t much of a place,” he half apologized, “but we’re just a couple of bachelors, an’ we live the way we want.” He slapped the bed he half lay on. “We put this here for when we get too drunk to make it up the stairs to go to bed.”
Raphael nodded.
“Hi, buddy,” Sam said.
“Don’t pay no mind t’ ol’ Sam there,” Tobe said. “He’s been on a toot fer three weeks. I’m gonna have t’ sober ‘im up pretty quick. He’s been sittin’ right there fer four days now.”
Sam smiled owlishly at Raphael. “I’m drunk, buddy,” he said.
“He can see that, Sam,” Tobe snorted. “Anybody can see that you’re drunk.” He turned back to Raphael. “We do okay. We both got our pensions, an’ we ain’t got no bills.” He took another drink from his bottle. “Soon’s it gets dark, I’ll get my truck, an’ we’ll go on back over to the Safeway so’s you can buy more groceries. They took my license away from me eight years ago, so I gotta be kinds careful when I drive.”
They sat in the stinking room for an hour or more while Tobe talked on endlessly in his raucous voice. Raphael was able to piece together a few facts about them. They were both retired from the military and had worked for the railroad when they’d gotten out. At one time, perhaps, they had been men like other men, with dreams and ambitions-meaningful men-but now they were old and drunk and very dirty. Their days slid by in an endless stream, blurred by cheap wine. The ambition had long since burned out, and they slid at night not into sleep but into that unconsciousness in which there are no dreams. When they spoke, it was of the past rather than of the future, but they had each other. They were not alone, so it was all right.
After it grew dark, Tobe went out to the garage in back and got out his battered truck. Then he erratically drove Raphael to the supermarket. Raphael did his shopping again, and Tobe bought more wine. Then the little man drove slowly back to their street and, with wobbly steps, carried Raphael’s groceries up the stairs.
Raphael thanked him.
“Aw, don’t think nothin’ about it,” Tobe said. “A man ain’t no damn good at all if he don’t help his neighbors. Anytime you wanna use my truck, of buddy, you just lemme know. Anytime at all.” Then, stumbling, half falling, he clumped back down the stairs. Raphael stood on the rooftop, looking over the railing as Tobe weavingly drove his clattering truck around to the alley behind the house across the street to hide it in the garage again.
Alone, with the cool air of the night washing the stench of the two old men from his nostrils, Raphael was suddenly struck with an almost crushing loneliness. The light was on in the upstairs of the house next door, but he did not want to watch Crazy Charlie anymore.
On the street below, alone under the streetlight, Patch, the one-eyed Indian, walked by, his feet making no sound on the sidewalk. Raphael stood on his rooftop and watched him pass, wishing that he might be able to call out to the solitary figure below, but that, of course, was impossible, and so he only watched until the silent Indian was gone.
vi
Sadie the Sitter was an enormously fat woman who lived diagonally across the intersection from Raphael’s apartment house. He had seen her a few times during the winter months, but as the weather turned warmer she emerged from her house to survey her domain.
Sadie was a professional sitter; she also sat by inclination. Her throne was a large porch swing suspended from two heavy chains bolted to the ceiling. Each morning, quite early, she waddled onto the porch and plunked her vast bulk into the creaking swing. And there she sat, her piggish little eyes taking in everything that happened on the street, her beet-red face sullen and discontented.
The young parents who were her customers were polite, even deferential, as they delivered their children into her custody each morning. Sadie’s power was awesome; and like all power it was economic. If offended, she could simply refuse to accept the child, thus quite effectively eliminating the offending mother’s wages for the day. It was a power Sadie used often, sometimes capriciously-just for the sake of using it.
Her hair was a bright, artificial red and quite frizzy, since it was of a texture that accepted neither the dye nor the permanent very well. Her voice was loud and assertive, and could be heard clearly all over the neighborhood. She had, it seemed, no neck, and her head swiveled with difficulty atop her massive shoulders. She ate continually with both hands, stuffing the food into her mouth.
Sadie’s husband was a barber, a thin man with a gray face and a shuffling, painful gait. The feelings that existed between them had long since passed silent loathing and verged now on open hostility. Their arguments were long and savage and were usually conducted at full volume. Their single child, a scrawny girl of about twelve, was severely retarded, physically as well as mentally, and she was kept in a child’s playpen on the porch, where she drooled and twitched and made wounded-animal noises in a bull-like voice.
Sadie’s mother lived several houses up the street from her, and in good weather she waddled each morning about ten down the sidewalk in slapping bedroom slippers and a tentlike housecoat to visit. Sadie’s mother was also a gross woman, and she lived entirely for her grandchildren, a raucous mob of bad-mannered youngsters who gathered in her front yard each afternoon when school let out to engage in interminable games of football or tag or hide-and-seek with no regard for flower beds or hedges while Granny sat on her rocker in bloated contentment like a mother spider, ready to pounce ferociously upon any neighbor with the temerity to protest the rampant destruction of his property.
At first Raphael found the entire group wholly repugnant, then gradually, almost against his will, he began to develop a certain fascination. The greed, the gluttony, and the naked, spiteful envy of Sadie and her mother were so undisguised that they seemed not so much to be human, but were rather vast, primal forces-embodiments of those qualities-allegorical distillations of all that is meanest in others.
“She thinks she’s so much,” Sadie sneered to her mother. “She has all them delivery trucks come to her house like that on purpose-just to spite her neighbors. I could buy new furniture, too, if I wanted, but I got better things to do with my money.”
“Are you Granny’s little love?” Sadie’s mother cooed at the idiot.
The child drooled and bellowed at her hoarsely.