Wild Wind Westward Page 18

  Outside the door, coming up the cold, hollow stairwell, Eric heard the sound of footsteps. At first he thought Jake Goldstein was on his way up, to make sure no transient had purloined one of his fifteen bedbug-ridden mattresses, but the footsteps were lighter than Jake’s and more hurried. Eric pulled on boots and cap; he had been sleeping in his coat. Presently there was a tentative knock on the door.

  “Come in.”

  A young man entered, good looking, but soft in an apple-cheeked sort of way. He was about twenty years old, and Eric recognized him: Bobby Lapin, son of Sam Lapin, the dockmaster for whom Eric had worked before coming down with pneumonia just prior to Christmas.

  The youth looked with real horror at the stained, grimy room, then at Eric. “You’re Gunnarson?” he asked.

  Eric nodded. Yes, his luck was changing! Sam had sent his son to fetch Eric back to the docks. Upon fleeing the Leedses and finding himself robbed of all his savings, Eric had fought back against fate with the forced optimism that is probably the last refuge of the undeservedly unfortunate. It had not been easy. Hubert Dubin, unprincipled captain of the S.S. Anandale, had once told Eric: “Son, in America you got to know how to make a deal.” To this rude maxim Eric had added a corollary: “But first you have to survive.”

  And he had done that, so far, barely.

  Staff members at the Norwegian consulate in New York were helpful, and for a time Eric had had several acquaintances there, bright career men who condescended only slightly to him because they wanted to hear their own tongue amid the barbaric babble of many-tongued New York. They were unable to get him a job, but they suggested that he gain American citizenship if he wished decent employment. Eric agreed, and, he reasoned, the consulate might serve as a meeting place should Kristin come to America, and he wrote her to that effect. Months later, after Eric had found temporary work removing offal from the streets of New York, one of the young foreign service officers brought him a letter. It was from Kristin. Unable to wait, Eric tore it open in the man’s presence. His face must have registered immense shock, because the other asked sharply, “Why, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “An old friend died in the homeland,” Eric fabricated, trying to keep his wits. But he never returned to the embassy after that, or saw the consulate personnel again, because Kristin had written:

  June 10, 1862

  London

  My Darling,

  This is written in haste and in the hope that it reaches you in time. G. intends to inform New York of the Subsheriff Johanson matter that caused you to leave Lesja. He may have already done so. I fear for your safety, although I was overjoyed to have received your letter, and to know there is hope for us. There will always be. We shall come to America next year when winter departs to open the Atlantic lanes, but I do not know if we sail from here or from Oslo. Be safe and well. Where you are, there I am, and where I am, so are you, too.

  All my love,

  Kristin

  So, thereafter, Eric frequented the consulate no more, nor did he send Kristin another letter, because that would have given Rolfson further cause to anger, and further need to see that Eric was hunted down. Nor could Kristin write again. To have sent mail in care of the consulate would have been as pointless as it would have been foolhardy of Eric to send her his address, lest Gustav learn it. Gradually, as the year dragged on, Eric’s life wound down, reduced itself to bleak need and high, private hope. On the one hand he had to stay alive. On the other, somehow, he had to meet Kristin’s ship.

  The former need was met when Eric applied for a job as stevedore. Dockmaster Sam Lapin liked his looks, appraised his strength, and hired him. Working on the harbor likewise rendered less unlikely Eric’s expectation of meeting Kristin: harbor news carried word of all ships, their arrivals, departures, points of origin, and destinations. While lying abed with pneumonia, Eric had grown somewhat anxious. What if, already, Kristin were in New York? What if Gustav had already dragged her off to some other part of the country? The world? But she had written: “…when winter departs to open the Atlantic lanes…” And that undoubtedly meant Kristin would be on one of the first ships arriving in spring. Yes, she would be on it, but so would Gustav.

  Lying sick in a dirty bunk, Eric imagined Gustav Rolfson in America, moneyed and powerful, courted by American businessmen, politicians, perhaps even people of society. Oh, he had observed it many a time, sometimes with amusement, sometimes bitterly. The penniless foreigner, just off a freighter, or up out of the steerage section in a passenger vessel, the person as ridden with lice as the ship was laden with barnacles: that person would be cursed, reviled, shunted aside, laughed at. He would have to fight for a crust of bread, not to mention a job. But the rich foreigner, one who came grandly to the New World’s shores, no, he would be treated as a celebrity, a prince, and courted as a wonder of wit and civility by Americans who had not yet gotten over the idea that European rich were more intelligent, more refined, indeed, better in every way, than anything America had yet invented or conceived.

  Gustav Rolfson! And Kristin on his arm!

  But young Bobby Lapin had no idea what thoughts possessed Eric Gunnarson, or what passions stirred and guided his life.

  “Pa told me you’d been laid up with the pneumony,” he was saying. “How you feeling?”

  Eric felt a coughing fit coming on, but held it back. “Fine,” he said. “All ready to go.”

  Lapin looked doubtful. “I got a proposition for you,” he said.

  “So the dock job is still open,” answered Eric, pleased.

  “What?”

  “The job I had. Working for your father…”

  Young Bobby waved away the matter, a thing of no consequence.

  “You must be kidding,” he said. “The war has ruined business. Shipping is less than half what it was just last year. It’s all the fault of that damnable ape-man, Lincoln. Freed slaves have come north to work for almost nothing. The Irish, who previously held jobs taken by the Negroes, are up in arms. The city is a vicious place, just now. And, to make it worse, Lincoln has imposed a draft. The immigrants don’t see why they should be called into the army, and they are on the verge of becoming violent. In fact, that’s why I’m here to see you.”

  So there, was no job, Eric thought, sitting down on his bunk. He motioned Lapin to do the same, but the youth, after another brief disgusted glance at the mattresses, declined.

  “I’ve just been drafted myself,” Lapin said. “I’m supposed to report in early May.”

  “I wish you well.”

  “But don’t you see? That’s why I’m here. Pa has a soft spot for you. This is your big opportunity.”

  Eric was astonished; Lapin made no sense. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You can be my substitute!” Lapin explained happily. “It’s all legal, and everything. I’ll pay you the required three hundred dollars, and—”

  “I’ll go off to war and be killed,” Eric finished.

  “No, no, that won’t happen. The war will probably be over before you finish training. It might even be over by the time I’m…you’re due to report for service.”

  Of that estimate Eric was very skeptical. He had made it a point to learn as much about America as he could, its society, its economy, and its politics. The war was tearing the country apart, and it seemed to be far from over. Newspapers, from 1861 on, had reported disaster after disaster for Lincoln and the North. General McClellan, commander of the much vaunted but seldom active Army of the Potomac, claimed always to be on the verge of taking Richmond, the Confederate capital, but this was difficult without giving the order to attack, which McClellan hesitated to do. Ulysses S. Grant was more pugnacious, but the North’s victory at Shiloh cost the Union thirteen thousand dead. The South lost eleven thousand men. No sweetness in such victory, and Robert E. Lee held on, hoping, fighting, retreating to fight again. Lee’s were the tactics of Washington in the Revolutionary War: maintain an army, in hiding, in the fields, in t
he trenches. Just keep the army together, and you are not defeated. Keep the army together and wait until the time is right to strike. That time had not yet come. Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg: these were the names of places that, forever, would be marked also by blood, and the memory of blood. More battles waited to be fought. Many more. Eric knew this. Besides, he could not leave New York. Even now Kristin might be aboard a ship on her way.

  “I can’t do it. I must stay here, work…”

  “There are no jobs,” said Lapin emphatically. “I just told you that.”

  Eric did not wish to discuss the matter further. He felt bad enough already, without having to consider himself a piece of cannon fodder, capable of being bought and used to keep this chubby son of a wealthy man out of the army. A life for a life: one loses, one wins. Eric saw that he would not be the winner in such a human equation.

  “I can’t be in your army anyway,” he said bleakly. “You see I’m not a…that is, I haven’t finished my citizenship process yet.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” Lapin declared. “They’ll take care of that for you in the army.”

  “They will?”

  “Certainly. It’s being done left and right, all the time. What is it, anyway? Just a piece of paper. You’ve been here now…how long?”

  “Two years.”

  “Two years! That’s a whole generation these days. Lincoln is drafting micks and paddies just in off the boat, still stinking of cabbage from their last meal on the auld sod.”

  “Micks and paddies?”

  “The Irish. On account of they’re all named Michael or Padraic or some such. Watch out for them. They’re Vicious and they’re dumb.”

  Eric dismissed this outburst. As an immigrant, he, too, had been called these things, and much worse. Young Lapin simply did not understand.

  But do I understand anything either? Eric asked himself, disconsolately. Dubin’s words returned to him, kept resounding within his mind: “You got to be willing to make a deal, you got to be willing to make a deal.”

  What other prospects do I have? Eric asked himself. None, he answered, and little hope of finding any.

  “How soon would you have to know my decision,” he asked Lapin, “should I decide to go into the army as your substitute?”

  Lapin relaxed a little, and congratulated himself on being a clever persuader. He did not even have the insight to know that a hungry and desperate man is less difficult to manipulate than a secure, healthy one with money in his pocket, food in his belly. And now he was happy, too, thinking he had worked his way out of the army, out of the prospect of dirt, orders, obedience, training, and—quite possibly—maiming or death. In this war the dead were lucky. The wounded lingered in awful agony, and died slowly, by the tens of thousands: there were almost no medical supplies, and even fewer doctors.

  “I would have to know definitely by the first of May,” he said. “Before that if possible. Pa told me to give you first chance. I’ll be speaking to others, of course, should you make the wrong decision and not take this fine opportunity.”

  Lapin went on talking for a little while longer, using the verbal touchstones Eric had come to know in America: “opportunity” and “freedom” and “progress” and “individual worth.” He had heard these words, and believed in them, but they were used sonorously, emptily, and all too often by people like Bobby Lapin, who would never be compelled to struggle for possession of the reality behind the meaning.

  “All right,” Eric agreed, gambling with himself and with time. If Kristin were on her way, she might well be in New York by May first, and then he would make with her whatever plans they could. With Lapin, Eric decided to deal as he had with Captain Dubin. He would not he, nor give his word of honor, only to renege upon it, but if this young man presumed so readily to use Eric, a portion of the favor might, with no lack of justification, be returned.

  “I expect I shall have a good word ready for you by the first of May,” he informed the happy young man.

  After Lapin had gone, Eric walked downstairs and out onto the cold street. A fine, icy drizzle was falling; the entire city looked grainy and gray. Eric invested a nickel in a huge mug of cream-filled coffee, and a roll of hard bread with a thick spear of yellow cheese stuffed inside. He had forty-five cents left now, but he felt better, even though he knew jobs were tight. He wasn’t coughing either; he actually felt quite fit, if a little weak. He decided to go down to the harbor and check the names of inbound ships. Then, too, there was also the possibility that Bobby Lapin had been wrong about the scarcity of jobs: people who do not need to work always say, accusingly, that anybody can get a job, or, with secret gloating, false pity, that nobody can get a job.

  The trek to the harbor was a little over a mile, and Eric had not walked that far in several months. Normally he would have gone additional blocks out of his way to avoid the Leeds house, but he felt his energy waning, and took a chance. If anyone happened to be home at this time of the morning, it would be only Liz. And she would be inside. Eric approached the dusty-yellow house, walking fast, on the opposite side of the street. But as he drew nearer, he saw a cluster of people standing on the walkway in front of the house. Nearer still, he saw that they were police officers, along with a half-dozen neighbor women who had come to gape not only at the police but at the Leedses’ furniture, which was scattered along the street. Eric recognized the dining-room table at which he had begun his happy letter to Kristin, a letter never sent. He also recognized the frame of his old bed, and the leg he had used to press down the plank over his money. Anger rose in him, along with curiosity. Had the Leedses been fire victims? He stopped but did not cross the street, not desiring to come into contact either with the police or the Leedses. No, the house did not look as if there had been a fire, although the front door was wide open. Just then two more police officers emerged, carrying a couch.

  “That’s the last of it,” one of them yelled to his mates.

  And in the open doorway appeared the beautiful red-haired Joan. She stood there and watched with her strange detachment as the police began loading the household furnishings into horse-drawn wagons. In spite of himself Eric could neither walk on toward the harbor nor take his eyes away from her. Even at this distance she emanated an aura: she gave off the spirit, the air, the very scent of the soft and lovely girl-child in need of protection, the shield of a man’s love and strength and being. Eric sensed this aura, as he had from the beginning, but sensed it with his body alone. His mind refreshed him with reality: Joan, no matter how gorgeous, no matter how apparently helpless, was to the hard rock bottom of her soul a schemer and conniver, a manipulator and user of others, not even perverse, because the admission of perversity implied an awareness of good and evil, and Joan was beyond both.

  “Eric!” she cried, with fervent, ruthless, penetrating and triumphant helplessness.

  He turned away.

  “Eric! Eric! Everything’s fallen apart!’’

  He began to walk.

  The police wagon, piled high with her mother’s household goods, pulled away from the curb.

  “Oh, Eric! Please!”

  Lot’s wife is in everyone, and the vestige of Lot’s wife in Eric looked back. Joan started down from the steps, then faltered, seemed to stumble, and fell. She rolled down the steps and came to a rest on the wet walk, motionless.

  He watched for a moment. She lay there motionless.

  Damn her, he thought. But no one else went to aid her, and he could not let a human being lie injured upon cold earth.

  It would seem to him later that fate had preordained that it should be he who crossed the street to her, not she who pursued him, begging for help. But he did not have an opportunity, just then, to consider the distinction. He went to her and helped her up. Sudden tears came to Joan’s lovely green eyes, her arms were open, and Eric found himself in her embrace. She seemed desperate, and yet the futility was oddly superficial. Again, the people and events she experienced seemed somehow
not to touch her nor to affect her as much as she affected them. Her body was warm against Eric’s, but he fought the wile and spell of her, remembering his lost three hundred dollars, the mean way in which the Leedses had used him, and Joan’s lies, too. He reached behind his neck, caught her wrists, and extricated himself from her embrace.

  Joan looked startled for a moment. Perhaps few men had ever done such a thing; certainly Mick had not.

  “Oh, Eric! I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  “I was passing by, that’s all. What’s the matter here?”

  Tears trembling, she told a terrible tale there on the cold March street. Liz, her mother, had caught the flu earlier in the year. It had turned into pneumonia, and she had died. Joan and Mick had been sad, of course, but they knew Liz had owned tavern and house. They would survive, even prosper. But, very soon, strange, hard men began to appear, either at the house or the tavern, demanding money, showing unpaid notes signed by Liz Leeds.

  Eric’s interest quickened. Well did he know the cruel power and leverage of forged notes!

  Joan’s tale, however, had a different twist. The men were legitimate creditors, in quest of proper reimbursement. Liz had put up as collateral tavern, house, and household furnishings in order to make purchase of a business enterprise down near the harbor. “She could have paid cash for at least half of it,” Joan said. “She had a lot of money. I’d seen her count it on the dining table.”

  “Then why didn’t she?”

  “Liz didn’t like to part with cash. So she took out the loan.”

  “What kind of business was she buying?” Eric probed. These Leedses, crooked to the core, could think of acquiring more wealth, while he had to struggle to stay alive!

  Joan looked away, but did not blush. “It was a house having to do with women and sailors.”