Burning boy, p.49
Burning Boy, page 49
Oh, five white mice of chance,
Shirts of wool and corduroy pants,
Gold and wine, women and sin,
All for you if you let me come in—
Into the house of chance.
After the Kid loses, the others jeer at him by chanting, “Five white mice! Five white mice!” and even as they go off to the circus together, they continue to mock him by suggesting that he look to other animals besides mice for help—“rabbits, dogs, hedge-hogs, snakes, opossums”—but he stands his ground and argues “that if one is going to believe in anything at all, one might as well choose the five white mice.” Along the way, he runs into the ’Frisco Kid and a man named Benson, who have “a little scheme” of dragging him along with them on an all-night binge, but the New York Kid says he can’t, he has to take the others to the circus, and when they insist that he forget about the others and the circus, he insists back at them that he can’t, that he’s stuck because of the lost bet, and as he begins to walk away, “they yelled with rage, ‘Well, meet us, now, do you hear? In the Casa Verde as soon as the circus quits! Hear?’ They threw maledictions after him.”
A small pause in the action follows as Crane extols the virtues of the Circo Teatro Ornin, which he calls one of the best in the world and far superior to any of the big-top entertainments up north. “At this circus the Kid was not debased by the sight of mournful prisoner elephants and caged animals forlorn and sickly. He sat in his box until late and laughed and swore when past laughing at the comic, foolish, wise clown.”
After laughing and swearing at the foolishness of the clown’s wise performance, the Kid returns to the Casa Verde looking for his friends, but Freddie tells him they left a few minutes ago, which sends him back outside to look for them. “At midnight a little Mexican street burrowing among the walls of the city is as dark as a whale’s throat at deep sea”—but eventually they are found, both snockered and leaning together against a wall, Benson fully blitzed and the ’Frisco Kid about halfway there. For the next two pages, we watch the irritated, cold-sober New York Kid try to get his drunken friends home, a hilarious scene in its way, with some sterling examples of slurred speech, such as “comonangetadrink” and “gome” as a contraction of “go home,” but after a while we begin to wonder what Crane is up to and where this pointless, meandering story can possibly be headed when, from one moment to the next, it happens, and suddenly the story becomes another story as the hammer of chance descends on the three ne’er-do-wells. Without the inconsequential nonsense that preceded it, the last part would not have the chilling impact it does, for this is how the world works, and when the do-or-die moment of danger thrusts itself into our stupid lives, it always comes when we are least expecting it.
This is one of Crane’s principal obsessions: the unforeseen encounter with death. It was so much a part of his thinking that he even let it slip out—absurdly, inappropriately—in his letter to Nellie Crouse about the man of fashion: “There are men of very social habits who nevertheless know how to stand steady when they see cocked revolvers and death comes down and sits on the back of a chair and waits.” A year earlier, he had already written about such a confrontation in “One Dash—Horses,” the first of his Mexican stories: the sudden, terrorizing moment when a stranger pulls a gun on you and everything falls away and there you are, alone in the universe, unexpectedly looking at your own death, and how you handle this moment—for which there is no preparation, no experience from any other moment of your life to instruct you on what to do—will determine whether you wind up dead on the floor or not. The showdown. One person facing another person, each looking into the other’s eyes. This has nothing to do with the random, depersonalized death of a soldier in war—except in the case of hand-to-hand combat. In all other instances, the bullet or shell that kills you is fired by someone you can’t see, an anonymous stranger standing in the far distance. With the one-on-one showdown, you are standing face-to-face with the person who will kill you. Dread as opposed to out-and-out fear. And hence the paradox: What to do when you have no idea what to do?
As the two drunken boys are led through the streets by the sober Kid, “it chanced that three other pedestrians were passing in shadowy rank” and Benson’s shoulder accidentally jostles one of them. A simple apology would undo the offense, but Benson is too drunk to apologize. The jostled Mexican stranger wheels around, shoots his hand toward his hip (as if going for a knife), and says, “Does señor want fight?” The dazed Benson says nothing. Just as the New York Kid is about to pull Benson away, the ’Frisco Kid steps forward, pushes Benson aside, and answers the question for him: “Yes!”
Immediately after that word is spoken, Crane gives us this:
There was no sound nor light in the world. The wall at the left happened to be of the common prison-like construction—no door, no window, no opening at all. Humanity was enclosed and asleep. Into the mouth of the sober Kid came a wretched bitter taste as if it had filled with blood. He was transfixed as if he was already seeing the lightning ripples on the knife-blade.
For the next five pages, everything slows down as Crane plants himself inside the New York Kid and tracks every racing thought that darts through his head, even as he continues to look at the developing showdown through the Kid’s eyes. Inner and outer are eerily and magnificently in balance, and as the slow-motion waltz of anticipated violence unfurls in the Kid’s mind, Crane builds the scene into one of the most gripping passages in all his work. The Mexican, who has yet to draw his knife, leans toward the Kid and whispers, “So?” His face is “lit with a sinister decision,” and suddenly the Kid is reminded of the face “of a man who had shaved him three times in Boston in 1888,” and, both “fascinated” and “stupefied,” he imagines he can follow “the progress of the man’s thought toward the point where a knife would be wrenched from its sheath.”
But the Kid is armed as well, and he too has his hand on his hip, clutching his large revolver, and no sooner does he touch the gun than another irrelevant thought surges up in him: “He recalled that upon its black handle was stamped a hunting scene in which a sportsman in fine leggings and a peaked cap was taking aim at a stag less than one eighth of an inch away.”
The big and the small blur together, miniature men in peaked caps are hunting miniature animals while three pairs of full-sized men are squaring off against one another in a dark city street, all of them armed except the inebriated, semiconscious Benson, and once he has looked over at his friends, the New York Kid understands that he is
going to be killed. His mind leaped forward and studied the aftermath. The story would be a marvel of brevity when first it reached the far New York home, written in a careful hand on a bit of cheap paper topped and footed and backed by the printed fortifications of the cable company. But they were often as stones flung into mirrors, these bits of paper upon which are laconically written all the most terrible chronicles of the times. He witnessed the uprising of his mother and sister and the invincible calm of his hard-mouthed father who would probably shut himself in the library and smoke alone. Then his father would come and they would bring him here and say: “This is the place.” Then, very likely, each would remove his hat. They would stand quietly with their hats in their hands for a decent minute. He pitied his old financing father, unyielding and millioned, a man who commonly spoke twenty-two words a year to his beloved son. The Kid understood it at this time. If his fate was not impregnable, he might have turned out to be a man and have been liked by his father.
After that intricate mental flight about cablegrams and taciturn millionaire fathers, the Kid imagines how the other Kid would mourn his death—“preternaturally correct,” “without swearing”—and then, shifting course, Crane turns his attention to the images flooding the Kid’s mind, calling them “perfectly stereopticon, flashing in and away from his thought with an inconceivable rapidity,” and one sentence after that he jumps again and formulates another startling idea: “And here is the unreal real: into the Kid’s nostrils, at the expectant moment of slaughter, had come the scent of new-mown hay.” More smells quickly follow, all of them bucolic, all of them evoking peace and soothing tranquility, not imagined smells but real smells invading his nostrils from the “unreal real” as he waits “for pain and a sight of the unknown,” which immediately turns into another thought about the other Kid, who, he realizes, is about to be killed as well, which provokes yet another round of disconnected associations, a dizzying zigzag that mirrors the motions of a panicked mind at work. It’s a wild onslaught, but one that is thoroughly under control, and because I have not read every story that was written in the world before Crane wrote this story, I can’t say for certain that no one in the years leading up to 1896 had ever done anything quite like this, but I am hard-pressed to think of any writer before the twentieth century who attempted to follow the inner workings of a mind in crisis as Crane does in these paragraphs.
The Kid then understands that his only hope is to draw his revolver and “face down all three Mexicans.” If he can do it quickly enough, he will probably win. If he can’t, then he and his friends will be dead. As the showdown moves into its next and final act, the words of the poem about “the five white mice of chance” are repeated, not spoken by the Kid this time but simply there, suspended in the middle of the page to signal the beginning of the end of the story.
The next three paragraphs are all about the revolver and the Kid’s anxieties about pulling it from the holster without fumbling, an operation that must be accomplished at a moment when “the eels of despair lay wet and cold upon his back.” To his surprise, “the revolver … arose like a feather,” no doubt because “the Kid had unconsciously used nervous force sufficient to raise a bale of hay,” and there he is, suddenly in control as the Mexican emits “a low cry” and takes a quick step backward. In control now, yes, but also angry at himself for having been so afraid, for having overestimated the courage of the Mexicans, and this upsets him greatly, for now “the Kid was able to understand … that they were all human beings” and that all along his opponents’ fear has been equal to his. “Upon the instant he pounced forward and began to swear, unreeling great English oaths as thick as ropes and lashing the faces of the Mexicans with them. He was bursting with rage because these men had not previously confided to him that they were vulnerable. The whole thing had been an absurd imposition.”
The showdown ends in a standoff, and as the Mexicans disappear into the night, Crane concludes his existential puzzle with a short conversation between the New York Kid and Benson that recapitulates the philosophical underpinnings of the story, with the sloshed Benson taking the logical, Enlightenment view of a mechanistic universe ruled by the forces of cause and effect and the sober Kid suggesting that in the end—perhaps—life is ruled by chance, which is as much as to say that life is inexplicable. Why things happen as they do is surely life’s greatest mystery, but how they happen, which would seem to be a matter of close observation and study, can also be problematical.
Then, to top things off, there is the story’s last sentence, three short words that arrive with the suddenness of a match struck in the darkness—igniting the pages we have read so far and forcing us to think our way through them again.
“Well,” said the sober Kid crossly, “are you ready to go home now?”
The ’Frisco Kid said: “Where they gone?” His voice was undisturbed but inquisitive.
Benson suddenly propelled himself from his dreamful position against the wall. “Frishco Kid’s all right. He’s drunk fool and he’s all right. But you New York Kid, you’re shober.” He passed into a state of profound investigation. “Kid shober ’cause didn’t go with us. Didn’t go with us ’cause went to damn circus. Went to damn circus ’cause lose shakin’ dice. Lose shakin’ dice ’cause—what make lose shakin’ dice, Kid?”
The New York Kid eyed the senile youth. “I don’t know. The five white mice, maybe.”
Benson puzzled so over this reply that he had to be held erect by his friends. Finally the ’Frisco Kid said: “Let’s go home.”
Nothing had happened.
* * *
After reading “A Man and Some Others” for the first time in the fall of 1897, Joseph Conrad wrote Crane to tell him that Garnett considered it to be “immense” and that he himself admired it “without reserve.”
I am envious of you—horribly.… Your temperament makes old things new and new things amazing. I want to swear at you, to bless you—perhaps to shoot you—but I prefer to be your friend.
You are an everlasting surprise to me. You shock—and the next moment you give perfect artistic satisfaction. Your method is fascinating. You are a complete impressionist. The illusions of life come out of your hand without flaw. It is not life—which nobody wants—it is art—art for which everyone—the abject and the great hanker—mostly without knowing it.
A solitary man in the middle of nowhere. Dark mesquite stretching from horizon to horizon, a desert world without people, as silent and bleak as the landscape of a Beckett play, but far bigger, an American vastness of pure sky, pure earth, and nothing else, so huge that it resembles a dreamland, a site of cosmic struggle. It is the same world as the one depicted in the poems of The Black Riders—the same limitless desert in which men squat upon the ground and eat of their own hearts.
The man’s name is Bill. He is alone in that Texas wilderness because he is a sheepherder, “the only white man in half a day’s ride,” and as the six-part fifteen-page story begins, we find him bent over a campfire preparing his dinner. A Mexican sheepherder approaches the camp and warns Bill that he and his friends want him off the range. If Bill doesn’t “geet out,” they will “keel” him. Unperturbed, Bill replies with some harsh words of his own, telling José that he has just as much right to be there as they do, and if they come after him with their guns, he will “plug about fifty percent of the gentlemen present, sure.” So ends the brief powwow. Neither man has budged, and consequently it is only a matter of time before the showdown begins.
In spite of Bill’s tough talk, Crane leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that his hero is doomed. Outnumbered by eight to one, he has no chance of getting out of the confrontation alive. The story, then, will not be about how a lone Odysseus manages to outwit his enemies and overcome the odds against him, but how a stubborn, violent, cantankerous roughneck drifter chooses to make his last stand. All the tropes of the classic Wild West tale are present, but Crane subverts them, turns them inside out, and uses them to fashion another one of his existential puzzles. The question here is not one of chance and destiny, however, but of why. Why stay when reason tells you to run, when staying is all but certain to lead to your death? An all but unanswerable question until we remember the Alamo. And remember how deeply Crane admired those doomed men who held their ground and fought until every last one of them had been killed. And remember, too, how much sympathy he had for the one man who chose to leave, Rose, whom he called “a kind of dogged philosopher” possessed of a “strange, inverted courage.” The essential word is choose, which in Rose’s case, Bill’s case, and the case of Bowie, Crockett, and the others at the Alamo is a philosophical choice, and if you choose to die (for whatever reason—personal honor, faith in a cause, a hunger for martyrdom), the question then becomes how. How will you handle yourself when the moment of reckoning comes?
In the second part, Crane takes the unusual step of backtracking into Bill’s past. In most of his short stories, he tells us little or nothing about the lives of his characters before we discover them in the middle of whatever situation he has thrown them into. We know nothing about Fred Collins in “A Mystery of Heroism,” nothing about the lieutenant in “An Episode of War,” and nothing about the New York Kid in “The Five White Mice” except that he comes from a rich family, but here Crane takes the trouble to fill us in on Bill’s background—an indirect method of explaining why he has chosen not to run, for Bill himself never says a word about it and, as far as we can tell, never even stops to examine the implications of his choice—which is a choice that equals death.
In just over three pages, Crane tells the story in a swiftly charging narrative rush as sentence jams into sentence and occasionally explodes into acerbic psychological commentary, a whirl of incident that follows Bill’s long fall from wealthy mine owner in Wyoming to lowly sheepherder in Texas. The process begins with an unlucky night at poker
when three kings came to him with criminal regularity against a man who always filled a straight. Later he became a cowboy, more weirdly abandoned than if he had never been an aristocrat. By this time all that remained of his former splendor was his pride, or his vanity, which was the one thing which need not have remained. He killed the foreman of the ranch over an inconsequent matter as to which of them was a liar, and the midnight train carried him eastward. He became a brakeman on the Union Pacific, and really gained high honors in the hobo war that for many years had devastated the beautiful railroads of our country. A creature of ill fortune himself, he practised all the ordinary cruelties upon these other creatures of ill fortune.… He had already worsted four tramps with his own coupling-stick, when a stone thrown by the ex–third baseman of F Troop’s nine laid him flat on the prairie, and later enforced a stay in the hospital in Omaha. After his recovery he engaged with other railroads, and shuffled cars in countless yards. An order to strike came upon him in Michigan, and afterward the vengeance of the railroad pursued him until he assumed a name. This mask is like the darkness in which the burglar chooses to move. It destroys many of the healthy fears. It is a small thing, but it eats that which we call our conscience. The conductor of No. 419 stood in the caboose within two feet of Bill’s nose, and called him a liar. Bill requested him to use a milder term. He had not bored the foreman of Tin Can Ranch with any such request, but had killed him with expedition. The conductor seemed to insist, and so Bill let the matter drop.
