Burning boy, p.77
Burning Boy, page 77
At six o’clock supper, the Swede fizzed like a fire-wheel. He sometimes seemed on the point of bursting into riotous song, and in all his madness he was encouraged by old Scully.… The Swede domineered the whole feast, and he gave it the appearance of a cruel bacchanal. He seemed to have grown suddenly taller; he gazed, brutally disdainful, in every face. His voice rang through the room. Once when he jabbed out harpoon-fashion with his fork to pinion a biscuit the weapon nearly impaled the hand of the Easterner which had been stretched quietly out for the same biscuit.
This is the other side of paranoia, the manic side: strike before you are struck, throw out your chest and assert yourself before they jump you or back you into a corner, and if a few shots of whiskey can buck up your courage, by all means drink them.
Afterward, when the five men have withdrawn to the small front room, the Swede badgers Johnnie and the two guests into another game of cards, and once again “they formed a square with the little board on their knees.” Scully sits off to the side reading a newspaper, and with his thoughts fixed on distant matters that have nothing to do with him, suddenly he hears three terrible words: “You are cheatin’!”
Such scenes often prove that there can be little of dramatic import in environment. Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic. This little den was now as hideous as a torture chamber.
In other words, anything can happen anywhere, at any time and for any reason, for the stage is a neutral arena for any human story, and if one night a pair of clowns tumble onto the boards, the next night could bring Antigone or Oedipus with his mother and father or four card players overturning their makeshift table and scattering the cards across the floor, “where the boots of men trampled the fat and painted kings and queens as they gazed with their silly eyes at the war that was waging above them.”
The Swede is the accuser, Johnnie is the accused, and as the Swede holds “a huge fist in front of Johnnie’s face,” a scuffle breaks out, with the cowboy trying to push the Swede back and Scully and the Easterner clinging to Johnnie and all of them shouting at once: “Stop now!” (Scully), “He says I cheated!” (Johnnie), “He did cheat! I saw him! I saw him—” (the Swede), “Wait a moment, can’t you?” (the Easterner). A few seconds later, they all come to a sudden stop, as if pausing for breath. The Swede and Johnnie face off against each other, the first one accusing, the second one denying, and with nothing to break the deadlock of opposing certainties, the two hotheads agree to settle the matter with their fists. “We must fight,” says Johnnie. “Yes, fight!” roars the Swede, and when the cowboy turns to Scully and asks him what he’s going to do about it, the old man says, “I’ve stood this damned Swede till I’m sick. We’ll let them fight.”
Out they all go into the blizzard—into “the roar of the storm”—and a simple, dime-novel fistfight between two angry men is turned into a savage reckoning between elemental forces as Crane shuttles his focus back and forth between the participants and observers on the one hand and, on the other, the tumult in the air around them, a frenzy of wind so powerful that it blows away words the instant they leave a man’s mouth.
No snow was falling, but great whirls and clouds of flakes, swept up from the ground by the frantic winds, were streaming southward with the speed of bullets. The covered land was blue with the sheen of an unearthly satin, and there was no other hue save where at the low black railway station—which seemed incredibly distant—one light gleamed like a tiny jewel. As the men floundered into a thigh-high drift … the Swede was bawling out something. Scully went to him, put a hand on his shoulder and projected an ear. “What’s that you say?” he shouted.
“I say,” bawled the Swede again, “I won’t stand much show against this gang. I know you’ll all pitch in on me.”
Scully smote him reproachfully on the arm. “Tut, man,” he yelled. The wind tore the words from Scully’s lips and scattered them far a-lee.
“You are all a gang of—” boomed the Swede, but the storm also seized the remainder of this sentence.
They find a protected spot near the back wall of the hotel, a V-shaped patch of frozen grass untouched by the snow, and that is where the battle will be fought—on a small island of space cut off from the larger space around them: a boxing ring, as it were, or another stage on which one more human drama can be played out. The Easterner, whose teeth are chattering as he hops “up and down like a mechanical toy,” observes that the “prelude had in it a tragedy greater than the tragedy of action, and this aspect was accentuated by the long mellow cry of the blizzard, as it sped tumbling and wailing flakes into the black abyss of the south.”
Scully gives the command to start. “Now!” he says, and as the two men start to pound each other in the darkness, there is “such a perplexity of flying arms that it presented no more detail than would a swiftly-revolving wheel.” The cowboy yells out, “Go it, Johnnie; go it! Kill him! Kill him!” The Easterner, however, regards the monstrous, “unchangeable fighting” as an abomination and longs for it to end. The Swede knocks down Johnnie, who falls with “a sickening heaviness to the grass.” As he lies there on his back, his face “bloody, pulpy,” his father asks him if he can go on. “Yes, I—it—yes,” he says, and with his father’s help he struggles back to his feet. The Easterner begs Scully to put a stop to it, but the old man ignores him, and then the Swede closes in to deliver his knockout punch. In spite of the odds against him, Johnnie, “half-stupid from weakness … miraculously dodged, and his fist sent the over-balanced Swede sprawling.”
The cowboy, Scully, and the Easterner burst into a cheer that was like a chorus of triumphant soldiery, but before its conclusion the Swede had scuffled agilely to his feet and come in berserk abandon at his foe. There was another perplexity of flying arms, and Johnnie’s body again swung away and fell, even as a bundle might fall from a roof. The Swede instantly staggered to a little wind-waved tree and leaned upon it, breathing like an engine, while his savage and flame-lit eyes roamed from face to face as the men bent over Johnnie. There was a splendor of isolation in his situation at this time which the Easterner felt once when, lifting his eyes from the man on the ground, he beheld that mysterious and lonely figure, waiting.
The bulkier, more powerful Swede has won. Returning to his senses, Johnnie begins to weep “from shame and bodily ill,” and as the tears slide down over the blood marks on his face, he says, “He was too—too—too heavy for me.” Scully announces that “Johnnie is whipped,” the cowboy lets out a string of “unspellable blasphemies,” and the Easterner is “startled to find that they were out in a wind that seemed to come direct from the shadowed arctic floes. He heard again the wail of the snow as it was flung to its grave in the south. He knew now that all this time the cold had been sinking into him deeper and deeper, and he wondered that he had not perished. He felt indifferent to the condition of the vanquished man.”
After the men go back inside, the Swede clomps upstairs to his room, and the others warm themselves by the stove in the card-strewn “torture-chamber.” The women of the household sweep in to carry Johnnie off to the kitchen, where they will wash him and dress his wounds, but before they make their joint exit, Mrs. Scully lashes into her husband with an angry verbal assault: “Shame be upon you, Patrick Scully! Your own son, too. Shame be upon you!”
The triumphant Swede comes downstairs, bangs open the door with a theatrical flourish and “swagger[s]” to the middle of the room. His bag is packed, he is on his way out of the hotel, and once again he asks Scully how much he owes him, to which Scully once again says, “Nothin’.” Just to make sure, the Swede asks the question again, and again Scully says, “You don’t owe me nothin’.”
“Huh!” said the Swede. “I guess you’re right. I guess if it was any way at all, you’d owe me somethin’. That’s what I guess.” He turned to the cowboy. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” he mimicked, and then guffawed victoriously. “Kill him!” He was convulsed with ironical humor.
But he might have been jeering at the dead. The three men were immovable and silent, staring with glassy eyes at the stove.
The Swede opened the door and passed into the storm, giving one more derisive glance backward at the still group.
The story could have ended there, for that moment marks the end of the action in the blue hotel, and it would have been a perfect ending in its way, the abrupt but satisfying conclusion to a gripping piece of work, but Crane pushes on for two more chapters, and by digging further, and then digging still further into the consequences of what he has set in motion, he transforms his already good story into a great one.
The second-to-last chapter begins:
The Swede, tightly gripping his valise, tacked across the face of the storm as if he carried sails. He was following a line of little naked gasping trees, which he knew must mark the way of the road. His face, fresh from the pounding of Johnnie’s fists, felt more pleasure than pain in the wind and the driving snow. A number of square shapes loomed upon him finally, and he knew them as the houses of the main body of the town. He found a street and made travel along it, leaning heavily upon the wind whenever, at a corner, a terrific blast caught him.
He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede found a saloon.
The closed-in, hermetic world of the blue hotel has been blasted open, and suddenly Crane has thrust us out into the howling infinite of the white tundra. He imagines an earth so hostile to life that it is devoid of people, and if human beings exist, they must be looked upon as a sort of miracle. In “The Open Boat,” he compared men to mice, insignificant creatures nibbling “the sacred cheese of life,” and now he goes one step farther down the chain of being and compares them to lice, parasitic vermin clinging to a frozen, fiery, plague-ridden planet careening blindly through space, which is the darkest, most despairing picture he has ever presented of humanity, and yet, what he also says in this knotted, tormented passage is that the arrogance and self-importance of man (“the conceit”) is the thing that keeps him going (“the very engine of life”), and yet, shifting gears once again in the next sentence, he declares that a person would have to be a “coxcomb” (a conceited dandy, a fop, or, in contemporary parlance, a jerk) not to die in this storm, and not only does the Swede not die in it, he chances upon a saloon.
We are still in Nebraska, but at the same time Crane has shifted the perspective so drastically and taken us so far from the town of Romper that he wants us to look down on this place as if it were a mere speck in the cosmos (which it is), but because men are involved in what is about to happen, it is of the utmost importance to men, for man is the measure of all things, at least as far as men are concerned, and therefore, lice though they may be in the large cosmic picture, what happens to human beings on earth matters, matters deeply, and is not, and never will be, meaningless, for bleak as Crane’s vision of mankind has become, he is not a nihilist, and what men do to one another counts, not in the cosmos at large, perhaps, but in the moral universe created by men.
The next paragraph begins with a sign of warning. A red lamp hangs over the front door of the saloon, turning the snowflakes that fall within its arc the color of blood, and as the Swede opens the door and goes in, he is still inside the dime novel being written in his head, still flush with the victory he has won in his first Western combat. He looks around and sees that the only other customers are four men drinking at a table in a far corner of the room. In a chipper, exultant mood, he walks up to the man behind the bar and, “smiling fraternally,” orders some whiskey. After the bartender rings up the sale on the nickel-plated cash register, the Swede takes hold of the bottle, pours himself an extra-large glass, and drinks it down in three gulps. The bartender steals a furtive glance at the blood-marks on the Swede’s face and says, “Bad night.” No, not at all, the Swede says, it’s good enough for him, and in fact he likes this weather, he likes it, and it suits him fine. He asks for another drink, but when he offers to buy one for the bartender, the bartender declines and instead asks the Swede how he hurt his face. The Swede proudly tells him he was in a fight and that he “thumped the soul out of a man down here at Scully’s hotel.” That arouses the interest of the four men at the table. One of them asks, “Who was it?” and after the Swede tells them it was Johnnie Scully and that “he’ll be pretty near dead for some weeks,” he asks the others if they’ll join him in a drink. No thanks, says one of them, and then Crane cuts away from the Swede and turns his attention to the four men.
Two prominent local businessmen and the district attorney are gathered around the table with their friend, “a professional gambler of the kind known as ‘square,’” a distinguished gentleman in his own right who is not only respected by the leading men of the town but is considered to be a “thoroughbred.” It is true that he earns his living by preying upon “reckless and senile farmers who, when flush with good crops, drove into town with the pride and confidence of an … invulnerable stupidity,” but it is also true that he is married, the father of two children, and leads “an exemplary home life.” Crane could not be more emphatic about the virtues of “this thieving gambler,” who is also “so generous, so just, so moral, that, in a contest, he could have put to flight the consciences of nine-tenths of the citizens of Romper.”
If we are in the moral universe of men, then the gambler is an ambiguous case, a person who is simultaneously both one thing and another thing, a living, breathing contradiction who undermines any clear-cut certainties about what constitutes moral behavior, since Crane has made a point of calling this person “moral,” in spite of the fact that he has also called him a thief. But he is a thief only in the sense that he is cunning enough to lure dim-witted bumpkins into playing cards with him, for he plays his cards “square,” on the up and up, and he walks off with their money only because he is a more skillful card player than they are. And now, in what is probably the story’s most elegant turn, this gambler is about to become entangled in the life of the card-playing Swede, who has walked into the saloon to celebrate his manly, two-fisted triumph over a supposed card cheat in the supposedly lawless, dangerous West. Blood-red snow is falling in front of the saloon, and what happens now will hinge purely on the circumstances of the moment: a chance encounter between two men steeped in the business of chance.
Meanwhile, the Swede has been downing more shots of straight whiskey and is still trying to talk the bartender into having a drink with him. “Come on,” he says. “Have a drink. Come on. What—no? Well, have a little one then. By gawd, I’ve whipped a man to-night, and I want to celebrate. I whipped him good, too. Gentlemen,” he calls out to the men at the table, “have a drink?” The bartender, aghast at the Swede’s presumption, emits a hasty “Ssh!” “Thanks,” says one of the men at the table. “We don’t want any more.”
The Swede, however, will not take no for an answer. Turning aggressive now, as if he had slipped into the part of a roughneck brawler in a classic Western scene—the showdown in the saloon—he takes the second rebuff from the men at the table as a personal insult. Thrusting “out his chest like a rooster,” he tells the bartender that he is a gentleman, and he wants people to drink with him, and—just watch—he will make them drink with him. He strides off to the table, puts his hand on the gambler’s shoulder, and repeats the threat: “I asked you to drink with me.” Not bothering to turn around, the gambler gives him a sidelong glance over his shoulder and replies: “My friend, I don’t know you.” When the Swede continues to insist, the gambler calmly asks him to remove his hand from his shoulder and mind his own business. “What?” shouts the drunken, outraged Swede. “You won’t drink with me, you little dude, I’ll make you then. I’ll make you!”
Note that the Swede calls the gambler “a little dude.” Crane has already established that the cardsharp is a small person, “a little slim man,” but “dude” is a telling indicator of how profoundly the Swede has lost himself in an imaginary West created by the books he read as a tailor in New York City, for “dude” is not only a word that evokes a slick dresser but a term of derision applied by Westerners to know-nothings from the East, as in the popular tourist phenomenon known as the “dude” ranch. Because the gambler does not conform to the dime-novel image of the true Westerner, the Swede has called him a dude, that is, has misread him as someone from the East, and because he has won his fight with Johnnie, he now feels confident enough to cast himself in the role of the bullying Westerner, and by reversing the situation in his scrambled, whiskey-sodden mind, the Swede has inadvertently stumbled into dangerous territory. “Dangerous” was the word he used to describe the West over lunch at the Palace Hotel, but not then, and not even now, has it ever occurred to him that he could be an instrument of danger himself.
