You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up by Richard Hallas Page B

Mamie and then at me. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes weren't. "It was about a young American com ing over the Mountains in a box car to California to find his wife in San Diego."
     
    "That wasn't it," I said. I wanted to shut him up.
     
    "Oh, pardon me," he said. "Of course not. How could I have mixed it up. It was about a holdup. That was it."
     
    "Oh, a gangster story," Mamie said.
     
    "No, a tragedy," Genter told her. "Brutal folklore, as fine as anything Shawn O'Casey or Joyce ever wrote, but indigenous to our own soil."
     
    He was watching Mamie. She wasn't drinking now, but sitting on the bed, looking sort of blowsy-eyed and serious like a drunk does when he wants to be sober.
     
    "It was about a man, hungry, exhausted from lack of sleep, a magnificent animal, puzzled and hurt by th e outra geous arrows of misfortune, just as a Muira bull stands baffled and stung by the first sharp agony of the banderillas that plunge into his aware body.
     
    "Weary and with his somewhat handsome head bloodied by fate, he takes part in a fake holdup which a deceitful messenger wished to stage to rob his own employers. He waits at the appointed come r, and the footsteps of the mes senger come, shuttling warp and woof in the tapestry of life and death that is to be woven."
     
    I sat listening. The way he was telling it made me feel goose-pimply. I felt worse listening to him tell it than I had when I was in the holdup.
     
    "Oh, it's a hell of a story," I said. "Let's have another highball."
     
    "No, big boy," Mamie said. She looked like a baby that had been crying. "I want to hear it. It's a good story."
     
    I didn't want him to tell it, but another part of me wanted him to go on.
     
    "There's the scherzo enactment with cupidity leering from behind the shadows," Genter whispered. "And then, we wheel tragedy forward, suddenly lumbering, like a cannon rolling over the boards of a stage. The police appear. Our hero runs. Shots are fired. The messenger feels a bullet tearing into his back, cutting like a white-hot knife over his kidneys, his colon, splintering bone, smashing and ripping all the quivering, feeling, agonized cells of his flesh. Then he isn't any more—only his body there and feet running, in the night.
     
    "Our hero runs into a saloon and hides. Police run in. They arrest another man. They have several reasons for believing him guilty. He is to be hanged for murder.
     
    "And there's our hero, the magnificent Muira bull with a soul flowering like an infinitely small blossom on the desert. How can he save himself and yet save the man in prison?"
     
    He stopped and I didn't want to say anything.
     
    "Well, what then?" Mamie said. She was sitting trying to balance her head straight.
     
    "Well, what then?" Genter asked me.
     
    "I didn't get any further," I said. "I couldn't figure it out so I didn't work any more on it."
     
    "Ah, but that's a waste of life and effort and being," he said. "It is important. You must finish it. That's why I came down here. I waited and waited for you to finish it, but weeks go by and nothing happens. Life is racing past me. I'm getting old—I'm getting old! I can't wait! Even at the risk of spoiling the purity of design I must reach forward one lean, attenuated, white finger, and press the button that makes the current flow again.
     
    He had been yelling in a whisper again, but then he stopped and looked at me like he was laughing. But only his mouth was laughing. His eyes were like he was being cut to little bits.
     
    "Well, let's have another drink," he said. "We will beat down our crying, shouting cells, beat them down with alcohol, show them who is master."
     
    "You mean, we'll get cockeyed?" Mamie asked him.
     
    "Marvelous," he said. "You turn everything I say into the epitomized soul of wit."
     
    We sat there, punishing the Scotch. I wanted us all to get fried. I wanted Mamie to get so boiled she wouldn't remember anything Genter had said. She looked too drunk to