The Centaurus

Caldwell comes back toward the booths, blinking; he seems unable to find his son. He stops at Dedman’s booth. “Who’s this? Oh. Dedman. Haven’t they got you graduated yet?”

“Hi there George,” Dedman says. Caldwell does not expect much from his students but he does expect the dignity of formal address. Of course they sense this. Cruelty is clever where goodness is imbecile. “I hear your swimming team lost again. What does that make it? Eighty in a row?”

“They tried,” Caldwell tells him. “If you don’t have the cards, you can’t manufacture ‘em.”

“Hey, I got some cards,” Dedman says, his cheeks glowing ripely, his long lashes curled. “Look at my cards, George.” He reaches into the pocket of his forest-green shirt for the pornographic deck.

“Put them away,” Minor calls from far up in his runway. Electric light bleaches his skull and strikes cool sparks from the dried Coke glasses.

Caldwell does not seem to hear. He walks on to the booth where his son sits smoking a Kool. Giving no sign of seeing the cigarette, he slides in opposite Peter and says, “Jesus, a funny thing happened to me just now.”

“What? How is the car?”

“The car, believe it or not, is fixed. I don’t know how Hummel does it; he’s what you call a master of his trade.

He’s treated me swell all my life.” A new thought pricks him and he turns his head. “Dedman? You still here?”

Dedman has been holding his cards in his lip and fanning through them. He looks up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”

“Why don’t you quit school and get a job with Hummel? As I remember, you’re a natural mechanic.”

The boy shrugs uncomfortably under this unexpected thrust of concern. He says, “I’m waiting for the war.”

“You’ll wait until Doomsday, kid,” the teacher calls to him.

“Don’t bury your talent in the ground. Let your light shine. If I had your mechanical talent, this poor kid here would be eating caviar.”

“I got a police record.”

“So did Bing Crosby. So did St. Paul. They didn’t let that stop ‘em. Don’t use it as a crutch. You talk to Al Hummel. I never had a better friend in this town, and I was in worse shape than you are. You’re just eighteen; I was thirty-five.”

Agitated, Peter takes a puff made hopelessly awkward by his father’s presence and stubs out his Kool half- smoked. He yearns to divert his father from this conversation, which he knows Dedman in retelling will make into a joke. “Daddy, what was the funny thing?” He is overswept, as the smoke soaks his lungs with its mild poison, by a wave of distaste for all this mediocre, fruitless, cloying involvement. Somewhere there is a city where he will be free.

His father speaks so only he can hear. “I was walking through the hall ten minutes ago and Zimmerman’s door bumps open and who the hell pops out but Mrs. Herzog.”

“Well what’s so funny about that? She’s on the school board.”

“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I guess you’re old enough now; she looked loved up.”

Peter giggles in surprise. “Loved up?” He laughs again and regrets having stubbed out his cigarette, which now seems priggish.

“There’s a look women get. In their faces. She had it, until she saw me.”

“But how? Was she wearing all her clothes?”

“Sure, but her hat looked crooked. And her lipstick had been smeared.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh is right. It’s something I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Well it’s not your fault, you were just walking down the hall.”

“That doesn’t matter, it wasn’t my fault; if that was the rule nothing is ever anybody’s fault. The fact is, kid, I walked right into a nest of trouble, Zimmerman’s been playing cat-and-mouse with me for fifteen years and this is the end of the line.”

“Oh, Daddy. Your imagination is so fertile. She was probably in there consulting about something, you know Zim erman makes appointments for all hours.”

“You didn’t see the look in her eyes when she saw me.”

“Well what did you do?”

“I just give her the old sweet smile and keep going. But the cat is out of the bag and she knows it.”

“Daddy, now let’s be rational. Would she be capable of anything with Zimmerman? She’s a middle-aged woman, isn’t she?”

Peter wonders why his father smiles. Caldwell says, “She has a kind of name around town. She’s a good ten years younger than Herzog; she didn’t marry him until he’d made his pot.”

“But Daddy, she has a child in the seventh grade.” Peter is exasperated at his father’s inability to see the obvious, that women who run for the school board are beyond sex, that sex is for adolescents. He does not know how to put this to his father delicately. Indeed, the juxtaposition of his father and this subject is so stressful that his tongue feels locked in the bind.

His father kneads his brown-spotted hands together so hard that the knuckles turn yellow. He moans, “I could feel Zimmerman sitting in there like a big heavy raincloud; I can feel him on my chest right now.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Peter snaps. “You’re ridiculous. Why do you make such a mountain out of a molehill? Zimmerman doesn’t even exist in the way you see him. He’s just a slippery old fathead who likes to pat the girls.”

His father looks up, cheeks slack, startled. “I wish I had your self-confidence, Peter,” he says. “If I had your self-confidence I would’ve taken your mother onto the Burly-cue stage and you never would have been born.” This is as close to a rebuke of his son as he ever came. The boy’s cheeks burn. Caldwell says, “I better call her,” and heaves himself up out of the booth. “I can’t get it out of my head that Pop Kramer is going to fall down those stairs. If I live I’m determined to put up a bannister.”

Peter follows him to the front of the luncheonette. “Minor,” Caldwell asks, “would it break your heart if I asked you to break a ten-dollar ‘bill?” As Minor takes the bill, Caldwell asks him, “When do you think the Russians will reach Olinger? They’re probably getting on the trolley up at Ely now.”

“Like son, like father, huh Minor?” Johnny Dedman calls from his booth. “Is there any special way you want this?” Minor asks, displeased.

“A five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel.” Caldwell goes on, “I hope they do come. It would be the best thing that happened to this town since the Indians left. They’d line us up against the wall of the post office and put us out of our misery, old bucks like you and me.”

Minor doesn’t want to hear it. He snorts so angrily that Caldwell asks in a high pained voice, his searching voice, “Well what do you think the answer is? We’re all too dumb to die by ourselves.”

As usual, he receives no answer. He accepts the change in silence and gives Peter the five.

“What’s this for?”

“To eat on. Man is a mammal that must eat. We can’t ask Minor to feed you for free, though he’s gentleman enough to do it, I know he is.”

“But where did you get it?”

“It’s O. K.”

By this Peter understands that his father has again borrowed from the school athletic funds that are placed in his trust. Peter understands nothing of his father’s financial involvements except that they are confused and dangerous.

Once as a child, four years ago, he had a dream in which his father was called to account. Face ashen, his father, clad in only a cardboard grocery box beneath which his naked legs showed spindly and yellowish, staggered down the steps of the town hall while a crowd of Olingerites cursed and laughed and threw pulpy dark