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THE FENCES
a short story
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Bus
window. Bus window. Open or smudged, a
view of Milwaukee for Frank Zindler coming from the jail that was usually very dull.  The street with its small
stores, bars, some apartments above, old houses brutally close to the traffic. Side streets with rows of more plain, dirty houses. Lots of trash cluttering the gutters. But it was spring, a warm out-of-focus day, already hazy with traffic adding to its share with exhaust. The diesel smell of the bus through the window seemed to be blended with that of hot tar. New activity on the streets, and he turned his thin face almost dreamily to feel the breeze through the partly-opened grimy window of the bus, finding everything he saw quietly absorbing. The few trees in sight were putting out lots of new leaves. It even fuckin' smells like spring, he thought. Maybe it was lilacs, like he used to break off in purple bunches for his mother to stick in vases around the kitchen of their upstairs flat. Of course, every minute on the bus was a minute away from jail for Frank, but that didn't seem so important. Jail was all right, at least if you were a Hubie. They let him out to go to work, and the rest of the time he played cards and slept. And there were a lot of good guys in there. Roger Sharhag he knew from way back, back to when they both had paper routes from the same station on Hopkins Street. The colored guys pretty much kept to themselves unless you fucked with them. But he liked to stay on their good side, even to be hip enough to drink at a colored bar like Curt's Tap on Lloyd Street. The Huber Law lunch on the seat next to him rattled under his resting left hand, the lunch that managed to look different and official even though it was just in a brown paper bag like everybody else carried to work. But it was an unused unwrinkled bag, folded down too neatly and stapled shut, and it was a good reminder of the jail and Mr. Huber's law -- whoever Huber might have been -- that let Frank out to go to his job every day at the can company so he could support Dorinne and the baby. As the bus growled with its familiar rising pitch through the gears he gave the lunch the sneer he felt it deserved and started to push it through the window gap. He thought about it, remembering the dour, somehow official-looking face he'd seen on the bus driver when he got on at State Street, squeezed it as hard as he could with one hand and shoved it back far under the seat. Two baloney sandwiches, he knew, and a withered apple and a hard-boiled egg. He never even looked any more. But he had to take it, and they made him pay for it too. But he'd get something decent from the vending machines at work. He gazed out the window, relaxed, his narrow body slipping further down in the seat. He wondered when Dorinne would come to pick him up with the car. One of these mornings soon, he hoped. He didn't mind not seeing her for a while, her with her whiny voice, but if she picked him up he'd have time to stop and catch a few at Curt's, enough to get high if he drank fast, and maybe shoot some pool, too, before he had to get to work. Christ, he wanted to get drunk, it had been so long. He knew how it would hit him, the early-morning two or three double shots of Phil Boileux on an empty stomach, his skin still dull and grainy from sleep, tight around the eyes, stretching over the burning brandy mixing with the warm sunlight coming through Curt's window till he was stretched tight and floating on light feet out the door and into the car. Then he could look at everything, Dorinne and the can company -- the can company where the never-ending thump of presses and shears and the chatter of millions of cans turned your eardrums into stone if you weren't careful, and the sweat and grease on your skin left you feeling like a piece of scrap aluminum in an oil bucket -- like it was on the other side of his windshield and he was in his car just driving through cozy and in control of everything. Even now without drinking he could almost imagine himself high. The heat, even though still barely comfortable this early in the morning, seemed to press the air into sheets of shimmering glass in front of him. He watched through them, and the neighborhood where the bus was now was even more beckoning. It was less rundown here, more white, here was where he grew up, he knew the whole city but this was where he started. There's Eddie Lancin's Tavern. A sign in the gravel parking lot: CAR PARKERS WANTED DAY OR NIGHT He was never quite sure what that meant. A job parking cars, or an offer to rent spaces? Of course, it couldn't be a job -- but who would rent a space during the day in this part of the city? Third shift workers, maybe. American Motors had a lot of them, and he'd worked short third himself -- six and a half hours for eight hours pay -- whenever he could at the can company. Even though it had probably fucked up his natural internal clock so that a normal sleeping schedule was still hard to go back to. And Laessig's Tavern, where he had shoveled snow and stocked the coolers and separated bottles under the chute in the basement, scratching tax stamps with a church key because of the government. His stepfather, who held a regular job as a cook -- sometimes even a chef -- had also tended bar there part time, and once -- crouching down next to an opened cooler behind the bar -- Frank had heard him talking to some lady on a bar stool about how she let him take her home one night, why not tonight? Frank never said anything about it to anybody, not even his mother after those times he knew they were fighting and his stepfather was complaining about everything -- his mom's lack of sexiness, for one, Frank figured, from the way she'd push his stepfather away if he tried to grab her someplace when she was doing chores, like the supper dishes. Frank hated to see her touched like that; she was obviously embarrassed for him to be there. Still, she embarrassed him, too, in the oppressive heat of summer days walking around the kitchen in just a white bra on top. He didn't know much about bras, but he thought the idea was they should cover everything inside like tents; hers just overflowed in bulging masses. He did his best not to look, but could never bring himself to mention anything. In fact, there was one time he was sure she was practicing what she thought was enlightened sex education: She had timed it so that when he came out of the bathroom she strolled stark naked across the kitchen -- dark pubic thatch unmistakable -- causing first a terrific jolt, especially since otherwise she tinted her hair, Auburn she called it, with that awful-smelling henna that permeated the house, then blankness as he refused to think about it. And he had already been getting hints from Jerry and Dick Dahl from the house whose windows just across the narrow side yard lined up with his, about the summer show she gave them in her bra, though he figured they didn't really want to tip him off, either, and for a while he didn't get it . . . But that was another of the old man's gripes: Frank monopolized the bathroom with lengthy showers -- and facing and lowering the focus of the shower head and its sharp spray could occasionally bring him to ejaculation, prolonging the washup -- and had lifted a few cans of beer from the refrigerator when he thought they wouldn't be missed -- bringing criticisms usually relayed through his mother. There were even imaginary plots when they supposedly talked about the stepfather behind his back, leading her in arguments to the point where his stepfather said that he felt like hitting her when she would get "that look" on her face. Still, Frank never gave up on the idea that she might really want to know about the woman, though his mother never did get hit. After divorcing his alcoholic father she had learned to take care of herself -- especially with a war on -- and wouldn't have put up with actual violence. Then Locust crossed Hopkins, the wheels of the bus pounding along down the street, jarring at potholes. Like stomping a body, he thought. He'd been jumped once in high school getting off a few stops farther -- for some reason he'd been a real smart-ass in those days until he'd learned a lesson or two, and the two guys he'd never seen before who were pissed off at his cutdowns followed him down his street until he could take a few smashes to the mouth. He'd hurried through the house with his already swollen lips, not speaking to his mother and stepfather in the kitchen with their questioning looks; then he heard them speculating. "Frankie --" she had said tentatively. After a pause, they had looked at each other across the table, Hamm's beer bottles in front of them. His mother was dutiful about joining his stepfather when he came home late from work, even getting out of bed to sit up with him. "Well, he's a pretty good-looking guy," said his stepfather. "Probably a fight over some girl." Actually, he hadn't been seeing anybody; the guys on the corner outnumbered the girls, who generally had their pick using their own obscure reasoning. If they liked you they could cling like glue, though none ever admitted to anything but necking. And if not, everybody was just buddies, and girls not in the clique were kept out of their little gang . . . How many years had he taken the No. 12 route? It had still been a streetcar ride to and from North Division or the restaurant on the corner of Center Street and Teutonia where he washed windows and swept up for a few bucks. The clumps of women from Briggs & Stratton -- it was the 50s, not too long after the war -- looked tough and worn out in babushkas and leather jackets like men crowding aboard in the afternoon rush. Past the grade school with the new addition cutting into the old black tar playground, clean and cream-colored and small against the massed gray bricks of the old building. Right next to it was Fifteenth Street going one-way south, where he was in that accident with Grant Scherrer, near the beauty shop with the large glossy pictures in the window of Negro women with perfect shiny black or red hair and pretty faces. It used to be a television and radio repair place and he remembered sitting in Grant's old Buick taking the corner from Hopkins at about forty past the triangle with the stone eagle and the flagpole through the stop sign. The car coming on their right hit and the door on his side bulged hard in against the seat, up to where it was separated from the muscle of his thigh by only the thickness of his pants, but not hurting him. They kept going: Grant had been on probation, and they were both drunk. But the driver of the other car, a tough bony old carpenter, Frank remembered, who drove the Kaiser because of the roomy trunk where he could put all his tools, got Grant's number after all, in spite of his broken arm, and it cost Grant -- his lawyer running back and forth to Judge Krueger's chambers -- four hundred bucks cash to the judge to stay out on probation. Then the bus was at Twenty-first Street exactly, where he used to live, close enough to the Auer Avenue school playground that he could go home for lunch. Paying little attention to the soap operas his mother listened to on the kitchen radio, like Ma Perkins and Stella Dallas. Just as in the mornings, when he ate his eggs to Coffeehead Larsen and his Sunny Side of the Street theme song on WEMP . . . An old man with a cane and a large nose like a soft piece of strange ripe fruit got on at the bus stop he knew so well, near the low concrete wall holding in the mound of earth and grass that belonged to the corner house. And there was the metal garage by the house where Carol used to live, what was her last name? -- the one with the brown hair and the big tits. Doug's sister. Since he was twelve he'd often gone to sleep picturing how to tie her up and drag her into the garage and strip her without her knowing who it was, play with those two mounds, look at her pussy. Often in his dreams then there were naked girls, usually in groups like in showers or locker rooms, but he'd wake up realizing they were walking around hairy there, but with dicks -- maybe because he'd never actually seen a grown naked woman. Of course, he could barely say two words to her, and he rarely glimpsed her alone. Just in the cluster of neighborhood kids of varied ages who sat on summer nights on someone's lawn or steps, maybe talking about the Hit Parade last night on TV, passing along dirty lyrics to "On Top of Old Smoky" or something: On top of Old Smoky All covered with snow I lost my true lover For fucking too slow. . . . The thought made him smile now. Kids were sure stupid, all right. As the bus pulled away he looked up the street where he used to live -- his block was on a slight hill -- and thought of the things they did when they were really young. A block over was the steeper hill and what they called Suicide Alley, where they used to go sledding -- often ending up out in traffic. Or they could throw snowballs at cars from partway up, best when thick falling snow could obscure them from drivers while the headlights showed them the shapes to aim at. But always ready to run like hell if a driver circled around to come down the alley behind them. That was part of the excitement, though it was hard to tell why, and they didn't break any windshields that he knew of. But usually when he remembered when he was much younger it still only went back to the first daring more adult things like drinking pilfered beer and smoking and before that jacking off in the houses they made out of cardboard packing boxes in somebody's back yard. A few of them did it to each other, but he could never touch another guy's prick. The idea was creepy. He was glad to find out he had the biggest one, though -- especially since he would stay hairless well after most of the guys in his gym class. But now he was thinking of even earlier days, when they played games. Only the polio scare of the early 'fifties could keep them wistfully imprisoned in their own yards. Kick-the-Can, and there was that game with bikes, Chase they called it, a tag game played by teams on wheels ranging through the neighborhood. And another one they invented -- Yard-Running, or Fences, or something. The picture in his mind of the street as it had been under the climbing sun of the still-misty morning remained with him after the new diesel bus left the corner behind. Damn, the window was rigged so you couldn't even push it up more than a few inches. The bus had just pulled out next to the Texaco station on the corner across from the large two-family house where little Stevie used to live, next to Dougie's, the last house on the downhill-sloping block of yards and fences in between where they played the game, the game he couldn't remember the name of. He remembered walking up the alley, the whole ragged bunch of them. Pat and Freddy, the two brothers -- Irish and German they were -- one a red-head and the other with black curly hair. Pat, the bastard, still owed him a quarter from the time Frank bet him he would hang upside down by his knees from the top of the playground swings, and then backed out of paying. Frank never spoke to him again, hating him even more when he heard they both became cops. He was glad when he heard Pat had the smallest dick of any of them. And there was Stevie the crybaby, and Doug who could beat up anybody, and skinny Alan whose family kept his wizened old grandmother with the cancerous sore on her face with them in the house on Twentieth Street  looking
across to Union Cemetery. The fenced-in
area with bushy thickets around the edges obscuring the tombstones seemed huge to kids, going on for blocks. And there was his friend Donnie and himself and the rest, wearing $1.98 Indian moccasins or twelve-dollar engineer boots or whatever they were all wearing then. Lining up at the top of the block and taking off down through the yards, jumping and climbing all the fences. You had to go in a straight line, no matter what was in your way. It was a sort of a race, the one who finished first was best, but it was more than that. It took guts to run through some of the yards, but they could get up enough nerve to do it together, trampling everything in their way and yelling and breaking things. "Hey, bastard, betcha never get past Bublitz's." "Go to hell, willya, see that flower pot by Dorn's? I'm gonna -- " "Man, that one by Bublitz's is a bitch!" "C'mon, dammit, let's go -- " People hollered and came out of their houses, and men chased after them in some yards where the grass was perfect, where no kids lived, one especially, where there was a stiff wire fence with sharp points, painted green. The wooden picket fences were easy, and some were even sawed-off smooth on top. Some yards had hedges -- two yards had hedges, come to think of it, one of them where the people who hated kids lived, who were supposed to be so rich -- and they crashed through them getting scratched and grinding their feet into flowers and soft turned earth. The same dirt where other times they would pull up carrots and kohlrabi and grab tomatoes in the dark. Some yards had trees, of course, even some stunted fruit trees like plum and crabapple whose output withered and rotted on the ground. More gingerly in their own yards, they whooped on, maybe swinging on a clothesline if they could. The saggy wire fence by the house where the old crazy woman lived was easiest. Not that she cared whether anybody was in her yard or not. Seeming incredibly ancient and always silent and near motionless in a shapeless black dress, she was hardly ever seen outside, just looking through her window, though she was rumored to go out and kiss the sidewalk at the sunrise. A good trick for her, when you thought about it. And there was the hardest of all, the challenge, the tall Gothic iron fence that stuck its spears up close to the lower end of the block. You had to climb it and put your feet between the black-painted spears at the slippery top and jump off, and Frankie riding in the bus to work at American Can Company sixteen years later could still feel the sickening pull of the spear at the cuff of his pants as he just made it every time. He shrugged a little, thinking how far away it all was now. A cute young chick, probably on her way to high school, with puffed-up black hair and a short skirt got on the bus at Capitol Drive. Smooth shapely calves -- he didn't mind them a little full and muscular as long as the ankles tapered down, like Judy Majkowski's from roller skating at the Riverside rink -- and a round, bouncy little rear. He'd sure stick her if he had the chance. Why did he ever marry Dorinne, anyway? Well, she could drink beer as fast as he could, and that made her seem exciting at the time, he guessed. And she liked him in bed and didn't mind sucking his cock. The first one -- though he kept that to himself -- before they ever screwed, even swallowing it. Eventually he realized it was her way of never having to fuck, though he broke her down after several months of her insisting she didn't screw around. He liked that she could always come now, and she was about as pretty as anything he could ever get, and a real virgin, so he owed her something; getting pregnant added to it. And he believed she hadn't planned that, though he had wished there was an easy way to do something about it. Maybe Dorinne would pick him up from work tonight, if she could get a sitter. But she was so damn lazy, didn't care whether he had any fun or not. He thought about Dorinne, and Carol from the old neighborhood, getting more horny. If he hadn't gotten busted for that beer party, busted for having underage chicks in the house he and Grant kept for a party house, he might be getting that Carol right now, if he could find her someplace. He watched the girl's feet stepping on dirty transfers littering the corrugated black floor. That game, he wondered again, what was it called? Yard-Running? Fences? He remembered when they'd had to stop for a while. Ending up in a heaving laughing heap in Stevie's yard at the bottom of the block, wary of pursuers. They could always disappear into block after block of houses and alleys if they crossed Hopkins. But once looking back to see one of them -- was it Alan? Stevie? -- hanging stuck by his armpit on a curlicued point of the tall ugly fence. He was screaming, but somehow it didn't really seem like sounds he was making. Maybe it was the distance and the high pitch of his young boy's voice. There was his round tense mouth and it seemed like big red balloons that floated up in the air and hung there and broke. They watched from the distance while an adult finally lifted him off, and the balloons were gone and whoever it was on his way to the emergency hospital. The bus stopped and started again, now leaving behind the Hop Inn at Keefe Avenue. It looked like a remodeled brick bungalow. Frank knew they had a good pool table there. He wondered what would happen if he didn't go to work one day. He'd heard of guys getting away with it for weeks. His own father had walked away from the House of Correction one Thanksgiving Day and never went back since his mother didn't think it was worth the effort to have him picked up again for the few bucks child support he was supposed to pay, but never had. He needed the job to pay for the car Dorinne drove, but maybe he'd try it. Better there than Curt's, he decided. So far he'd stayed away from Curt's since New Year's eve, when one guy had shown a gun around getting ready to shoot into the air and another light-brown burly-looking cat with a thin moustache announced to no one in particular that he was going to kiss all the blonds at midnight. While Frank didn't know if that meant himself, he couldn't be sure, and what the hell could he do if Dorinne with her fake-blonde hair was actually singled out? There was one other blonde white woman there, trashy as hell. They were with  Donnie
Groeling and his girlfriend
Lorri, and without talking about it they quickly found a reason to all slam their beers and get back on the road while trying not to look hurried. No one ever mentioned it, but it just didn't seem like it was a good place to go after that . . . Finally, at the end of the line north of Silver Spring, he got off the bus, walking toward the expected mass of noise that was the factory, like iron junk being forever poured out of a galvanized bucket. He threw his balled transfer towards a sewer and unbuttoned the front of his shirt in the now-hotter sun, a white T-shirt underneath -- Christ, he'd sweat when he got inside -- and it momentarily ballooned in a wind gust. Damn, the dampness was building too and his Levi's felt sticky inside the crotch already, where he would turn red and raw if he couldn't get one of the cooler machines, like a palletizer. His ear plugs, standard equipment though some guys liked to seem too tough to wear them, dangled in their green plastic container from a belt loop. He figured he had enough time after the time clock to walk the longer route inside past the end-stamping machines where one girl, tall and thin but with a great ass, usually in tight pedal-pushers, generally seemed to hang around. She smiled a lot, with a pixie-cute face -- always wearing on her black hair the blue mesh cap with the short bill issued to the women. Lips so red he could usually spot her head bobbing around through the forest of oily machinery. He wondered if she ever went out drinking after work. What the hell was the name of that game, he thought. Fences? Yard-Running? Oh well. He walked through the gate in the high gray wire fence toward the factory, toward the heat and din, the smell of lacquer and the never-ending rush and clatter of steel cans. AN END 
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Irene
good night Irene good night
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