Ironweed Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Whatayou want to know for?”
              “I like to know people’s names.”
              “She ain’t got only one name.”
              “Okay, you don’t want to tell me, it’s all right.”
              “You goddamn right it’s all right.”
              “We gonna eat at the mission? I’m hungry.”
              “We could eat, why not? We’re sober, so he’ll let us in, the bastard. I ate there the other night, had a bowl of soup because I was starvin’. But god it was sour. Them driedout bums that live there, they sit down and eat like fuckin’ pigs, and everything that’s left they throw in the pot and give it to you. Slop.”
              “He puts out a good meal, though.”
              “He does in a pig’s ass.”
              “Wonderful.”
              “Pig’s ass. And he won’t feed you till you listen to him preach. I watch the old bums sittin’ there and I wonder about them. What are you all doin’, sittin’ through his bullshit? But they’s all tired and old, they’s all drunks. They don’t believe in nothin’. They’s just hungry.”
              “I believe in somethin’,” Rudy said. “I’m a Catholic.”
              “Well so am I. What the hell has that got to do with it?”
              The bus rolled south on Broadway following the old trolley tracks, down through Menands and into North Albany, past Simmons Machine, the Albany Felt Mill, the Bond Bakery, the Eastern Tablet Company, the Albany Paper Works. And then the bus stopped at North Third Street to pick up a passenger and Francis looked out the window at the old neighborhood he could not avoid seeing. He saw where North Street began and then sloped down toward the canal bed, the lumber district, the flats, the river. Brady’s saloon was still on the corner. Was Brady alive? Pretty good pitcher. Played ball for Boston in 1912, same year Francis was with Washington. And when the King quit the game he opened the saloon. Two bigleaguers from Albany and they both wind up on the same street. Nick’s delicatessen, new to Francis, was next to Brady’s, and in front of it children in false faces—a clown, a spook, a monster—were playing hopscotch. One child hopped in and out of chalked squares, and Francis remembered it was Halloween, when spooks made house calls and the dead walked abroad.
              “I used to live down at the foot of that street,” Francis told Rudy, and then wondered why he’d bothered. He had no desire to tell Rudy anything intimate about his life. Yet working next to the simpleton all day, throwing dirt on dead people in erratic rhythm with him, had generated a bond that Francis found strange. Rudy, a friend for about two weeks, now seemed to Francis a fellow traveler on a journey to a nameless destination in another country. He was simple, hopeless and lost, as lost as Francis himself, though somewhat younger, dying of cancer, afloat in ignorance, weighted with stupidity, inane, sheeplike, and given to fits of weeping over his lostness; and yet there was something in him that buoyed Francis’s spirit. They were both questing for the behavior that was proper to their station and their unutterable dreams. They both knew intimately the etiquette, the taboos, the protocol of bums. By their talk to each other they understood that they shared a belief in the brotherhood of the desolate; yet in the scars of their eyes they confirmed that no such fraternity had ever existed, that the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. They loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he’s just a bum, but who