The Ninth Wave Page 5

  The town regularly spent $43,500 a year and the three turkey-necked merchants and the chief controlled every cent of it. They noted it down on the back of envelopes and shifted the figures around and laughed a good deal. Once they gave the chief $1200 to go to an F.B.I. course in Washington, but he had a few drinks on the train and went to New York and stayed in a big hotel with a famous movie actress for a week. "Forty dollars for black lace panties and eighty-five for good bonded bourbon," he had told the merchants when he returned and they had filled the back of the office with laughter. He never did tell anyone the actress's name.

  Hank learned about business and high finance from a Jewish tailor. His name was Cohen and he had a little shop on the main street. He had lost his wife and four children in a pogrom in Poland. The mob had closed in dense and black on the ghetto, moving down the streets with a soft tinkling of broken glass and a great roaring sound. Cohen had hurried his family ahead of him as long as he could and then the youngest boy had said he had a stitch in his side and wanted to stop. In a second of panic Cohen had left his wife and four children huddled together against a wall as he ran ahead to search for a hiding place. He heard the strange lowing, eager sound of the mob and then as he ran back toward his family he saw the mob reach them. There was a nameless, odd, sharp snapping noise as the mob absorbed his family and he knew instinctively that they were all dead. He ran toward the mob, a thin scarecrow of a man, hoping to be killed, to be kicked to death, to suffer for a few seconds and then be gone with his family. He muttered curses through his stringy beard as he ran shouting in a high messianic voice for revenge and threw his skinny arms wildly in the air.

  The mob hesitated as they saw him. The low ominous howl diminished and they stared at him with bewilderment. By the time he reached them they were no longer a mob, only stolid businessmen, housewives, laborers, electricians, fishmongers. He threw himself on these individuals, hoping to be picked up and beaten and killed. But they pushed him away, the bright excitement fading from their eyes and replaced by a look of boredom. The crowd split up, began to walk away and there was no way that he could arouse them. He was never able to find the bodies of his family, for as if the mob had been a huge animal they had been absorbed, digested, and vanished away.

  Since the pogrom Cohen had always felt threatened by crowds. When his tailor shop had three or four customers simultaneously his eyes began to bulge slightly and he breathed quickly. Hank was in his shop one day when the Rotary Club came out of the hotel after their luncheon, their feet scraping on the pavement, their voices laughing, the sound of a crowd of people in motion. Cohen's head snapped up, his needle gleamed in the air, he seemed to stop breathing for a long second. Hank listened with the Jew's ears and a shiver of fear ran down his back as the businessmen laughed, shuffled their feet, lifted their voices in raucous jokes.

  "It's the Rotary Club," 'Hank said, leaning toward Cohen. "They've just finished their Tuesday lunch."

  "Ya, ya, of course," Cohen breathed, "only the Rotary Club." His lips curved into a smile although his eyes were brilliant with fear. He did not relax until the last sound had left the street.

  Hank was in Cohen's shop on a Fourth of July. Across town a band was playing, firecrackers popped and a parade was beginning. The sounds drifted lazily through the hot summer air, people put chairs on their lawns to watch the parade pass, the pulse of the town was slow. Cohen sat with the cloth close to his face, stitching rapidly and talking into the cloth.

  The parade rounded a corner far away and suddenly, by some odd refraction of sound, in the tailor shop Hank and Cohen could hear the shuffling of the parade, slow, steady, cadenced. The music stopped for a moment and down the hot dead air of the town, caught between the unpainted buildings, came the sound of marching feet. The sound of feet was not obscured by the music, but was a raw, solid sound with a vitality of its own. Cohen looked over the piece of cloth, his eyes glittered with terror. He put the cloth down and stood up.

  "I'm going for a, walk," he said and started for the rear door.

  "I'll go with you," Hank said, but the tailor did not even hear him. He walked quickly, staring straight ahead. He stumbled once over a sleeping dog and swung his head vaguely toward it when it barked in pain. Hank walked beside him. They were at the edge of town and still the sound of the parade had not diminished, but seemed to throb and swell as if the parade were growing in size. At some point Hank stopped thinking of it as a parade and thought of it as a mob also.

  They both walked faster and faster and when they got to the edge of town they cut across a field of rye. They were almost running as they crossed it and when he looked back Hank could see the erratic, zigzag path they had left, as if two small and insane animals had passed through. They splashed through a small creek and were oblivious of the mud that caked on their shoes. At some point the sound of the parade died away and they began to walk at a normal pace. Late that night they re-entered the town and Hank went quietly to the railroad hotel.

  Ever since that night Hank had known that he was a Jew. The crazy, stumbling flight through the town and across the fields was a kind of ritual; an initiation; the assumption of a burden; a primitive act of faith. Hank was thirteen years old at the time.

  Hank learned about love and the family from the girls at the hotel. Some of them were plain dumpy girls who worked in restaurants or in stores and others were simply whores, who wore flashy clothes very tight across the hips. And the professionals wore furs that Hank could not forget. They were skimpy fox pelts with the heads still attached. The jaws were strengthened by a spring and each of the mouths bit into the tail of another and they went over a woman's shoulder in an endless circle of biting foxes. Even before he knew what the girls did in the upstairs rooms of the hotel Hank hated them for the furs with the little glass eyes, tiny varnished claws and red biting mouths.

  The girls drifted into the hotel around nightfall. Some of them went steady with one man; others simply sat in the lobby and waited for an invitation. Because of the thinness of the walls, the open doors and the loud voices, what went on in the rooms between men and women could not be avoided. The sounds of it echoed in the corridors and the men talked about it in the dining room so that to Hank it was like the Lysol smell of the floors or the loose scabs of ancient paint on the outside ok the hotel. It was part of the hotel; part of its dark smelly substance.

  When he was eleven Hank had seen Old Kelly, the oldest engineer on the line, beat up one of the girls. She had run out into the hall and Old Kelly had caught her at the foot of the stairs. They had stood there, both of them naked, Old Kelly hitting her the way men hit one another, straight solid blows on the lumpy body of the woman. It made a sound like someone kneading bread; not a slapping sound, but a dull, soggy, damaging sound. The woman had scratched out at Old Kelly, but finally had fallen forward into his arms, so that he could no longer hit her. Hank had watched them make their stumbling broken way back to the room.

  Once two of the girls, a little older than the rest, had stopped him in the lobby. They were both very drunk and ready to cry. One had patted him on the head and said, "A little boy I might have had." Hank had knocked her hand away and backed off, angry. The two girls had cried, looking hopelessly at one another and at Hank. Big tears soaked their way through the powder and rouge and dropped pinkly and aimlessly from their chins. Their grief had been so great that they had staggered out into the night, without waiting for their railroaders to arrive.

  By the time he was thirteen Hank was too big and gawky to sit in the corners. They ran him out of the taxicab office and the pool hall and Cohen asked him one day why he didn't get a job. The girls in the hotel began to get angry with him for looking at them. Hank decided to go to school.

  Hank enrolled in the local high school. He was the best student they had ever had. He finished the first two years of work in a single year. But at the start of his senior year he discovered mathematics and poker and quit school.

  As soon as he lear
ned mathematics in school, he began to calculate the odds in the poker game that went on day after day down at the hotel. He took a statistics textbook from the library and with the deck of cards out in front of him he figured various combinations. He memorized columns and columns of figures and odds and chances until gradually he forgot the columns and knew by merely looking at a hand how it could be improved, how it compared with other hands and how a kicker would help it. Then he went down to the lobby where the men played poker and watched them. He moved from one man to another, watching their hands, checking their chances with his statistics. He noticed how some men place a chip over an ace when it comes to them down; that few men look again at their down card in stud if it is a face card; that most men swallow when they make a good draw; that the time to win in a poker game is late in the evenings when players are anxious to win back losings. The statistics he had learned rapidly, but the way men play took longer. At the end of a year he thought he knew enough to play.

  One night he asked the men if he could play and they laughed and let him in. He bought five dollars worth of chips, a little stack of white and red, that when held between his fingers ran only up to his second knuckle. He lost rapidly until he had only three white chips and one red chip left in his fingers. Then he got over the confusion caused by the smoke over the table, the eyes, the rapid flicking of the cards and he started to win. He played cautiously, like a very stingy old man, and by midnight he had won six dollars. He was sixteen years old.

  After that he played three nights a week. He carefully calculated his winnings from each man so that he never won enough from any one to anger him. His winnings were steady and constant, never varying more than fifty cents from the sum he predicted for the night. In a few months he had five hundred dollars in a cigar box in his room. The cigar box bulged with old tattered one-dollar bills, slick new fives, an occasional ten and a pile of silver coins.

  One day he heard a fireman state that the landlord's son was too good at poker not to be a cheater. Several of the other men nodded agreement. That night he got into the game on the first hand.

  Carefully and very slowly he began to boost the bets. He made all of the men commit themselves equally and by midnight a few of them were beginning to sweat and the smoke around the shaded light was thick and yellow. By three o'clock the pots were averaging over fifty dollars each. The eyes around the table had turned red and the floor was littered with sandwich crusts and empty whisky bottles. Hank had won four hundred dollars by then. He went relentlessly after the rest and by dawn he had all the money on the board and a note from one of the railroaders that he owed Hank $66. Finally he played them for their change, for the nickels and dimes in their pockets. He played one engineer for his Waltham and stuck it in his pocket when he won. Some of the losers began to complain, but Hank ignored them and went on playing. Toward the end he made such large bets that even men with good hands could not afford to back up their cards.

  When he had all of the visible money on the table, he said he was going to the toilet and left the room. He went to his room, packed a wicker suitcase full of clothes and climbed out a window. He walked to the railroad yard and swung up into an empty boxcar. The next day he was in Bismarck . . .

  "Why did you come to Manual Arts High after all that?" Mike asked when Hank was finished. "You could be a professional gambler."

  "Too boring," Hank said. "Gambling is the hardest way in the world to earn a living. Show me a gambler and I'll show you either a man bored stiff or a knucklehead . . . or both."

  "Do you ever hear from your father?"

  "No. Not a word."

  "Why don't you write him? I heard Jews were supposed to be great family people . . . always taking care of one another and watching out for other members of the family."

  "Sure, Mike. You hear a lot of things that aren't so," Hank said and grinned. "That's one of them. I'll tell you some more later."

  A mile ahead of them a Portuguese sheepherder was trying to move a thousand sheep across the road. Like a formless tide the sheep ebbed onto the highway and then stood there motionless as the sheep dogs circled and barked. Hank slowed the car and came to a stop a few feet from the closest sheep.

  "Well, I'll be damned," Mike said. "That guy probably had all week to get those sheep across the road and he has to pick the time when we are passing. What's wrong with that crazy guy?" He glared out at the sheepherder, his face working with anger. Suddenly he turned to Hank and his face wore the wolfish raw grin that Hank hated. "It's like everything else, Hank. You have to get out and fight for what's yours. I'll get us through this god damn herd of sheep. Just follow close."

  "Get back in the car, Mike," Hank yelled. "It will only take a few minutes for them to cross the road."

  Mike grinned back over his shoulder. He walked toward the sheep and began kicking them. The sheep squealed in surprise, pushed sideways and away from the car. Mike walked steadily forward, kicking, pushing, cursing. The Portuguese sheepherder swore and shouted, the dogs barked and ran in frantic circles. Slowly the Model-A with Mike leading the way pushed through the dusty panicked herd of sheep. Finally they were through the sheep and the road was open.

  Mike got back into the car. His face was streaked with sweat and dust.

  "That's the way to handle 'em, Hank," Mike said breathlessly. "Men, women, sheep, horses and dogs all need to be pushed a little."

  "And even if you're not in a hurry you have to get out and kick them?" Hank asked. "Just to be kicking?"

  "That's right, even if you're not in a hurry," Mike said. He looked slyly sideways at Hank. "But, of course, I'm in a hurry."

  "I know, I know," Hank said.

  The car sped down the road and began the long climb into the brown soft hills of the Coast Range.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Experiment

  Mike got a job as a guinea pig the second month he was at Stanford. On the bulletin board on the English Corner there was a sign that stated that subjects for an important psychological experiment were wanted. The pay was fifty cents an hour. The sign directed applicants to see Miss Bird in the Psychology Department.

  Mike saw Miss Bird and was hired. She told him where to report for the experiment and the next afternoon he climbed to the top floor of the Psychology Building. He walked down a long corridor lined with rat cages. He could see hundreds of pink eyes glittering in the semi-darkness and a wave of sound preceded him. It was the scurrying of thousands of horny feet. The smell of the rats was thick and hot; like rotted cereal. In one cage there were six rats with neat scars down their skulls. Something had been cut out of their brains for they stayed frozen in one position, unable to move, although their eyes glittered wildly when Mike put his face close to their cage. One rat had been placed with its forepaws tucked under its chin and it squatted on its hind legs. Once it shivered as it tried to move and its eyes rolIed, but it remained motionless . . . only its hair rippled.

  Mike turned away and walked down to the room where the experiment was being conducted. Two people were in the room and they were both wearing long white coats. One was a middle-aged woman, the other was a young man with protruding eyes.

  "Are you Mr. Freesmith?" the man asked. "I'm Dr. Sutliff. This is Dr. Urich."

  Mike shook hands with both of them.

  "Could you for the next week every afternoon be available?" Dr. Urich said. She had a foreign accent and spoke very slowly. "Two hours every afternoon?"

  "Sure," Mike said.

  They led him over to a large table at the end of the room. On the table was a large black box with a naked electric light bulb protruding from the top. There were two windows in the front of the box, one covered with a red card, the other with a blue card. In the center of the machine was a small funnel. Mike sat down at the chair in front of the apparatus.

  "The object of the experiment is to see how many times you can cause the light to go on," Dr. Urich said in a slow precise voice. Mike sensed that this was a special voice, devel
oped just for giving instructions to subjects. "The light can be illuminated by pressing one or the other of the two cards. Every five seconds a machine within the box automatically changes the cards, giving you cards of different colors. It also changes the window, which will close the circuit and cause the light to go on. So every five seconds you will have a fresh choice. Each time you illuminate the light a penny will drop out of the funnel. You may keep all the pennies you earn. If they do not equal fifty cents an hour we will make up the difference. Do you have any questions?"

  "No."

  "You may begin."