And yet, although the knowledge of her indifference was almost a physical agony, the roaring fire inside him had far greater power, and the only thing he could do was surrender himself to it. As he took his woman, the fire was solely his own fire and there was the sordid and dismal feeling, and finally the downright horrible feeling, of being alone in the bed.

  Then, some moments later, he was actually alone in the bed and he heard Mildred moving around in the parlor. He climbed out of bed, quickly put his clothes on and walked into the parlor. Mildred was lighting a cigarette. She puffed at it slowly, took it out of her mouth and gazed thoughtfully at the burning tobacco. Cassidy waited for her to say something.

  She had nothing to say. He discovered that it was impossible for him to interpret her attitude. The quiet was bothering him and gradually it became worse and eventually he had the notion that the floor was giving way. He groped in his brain, trying to remember if anything like this had ever before happened between them. Everything else had happened, but never quite like this.

  Presently she looked at him. In a matter-of-fact way, she said, “Today's my birthday. That's why I threw the party.”

  “Oh.” Cassidy's face was blank for a long moment. Then he tried a smile. “I knew you were sore about something. I guess I should have remembered.”

  He reached into his pants pocket and came up with a ten-dollar bill. He widened the smile as he handed her the money and said, “Buy yourself something.”

  She gazed down at the ten-dollar bill in her palm and said, “What's this?”

  “It's a birthday present.”

  “You sure about that?” Her voice was low and calm. “Maybe you're just paying me a fee for what happened in the bedroom. If that's the case, I wouldn't want you to cheat yourself. It wasn't worth a thin dime.”

  She crumpled the bill and threw it in Cassidy's face. Then she had the door open and, while Cassidy stood there blinking, she ran out.

  2

  In the kitchen, Cassidy tried to clean up the mess of bottles and dishes and stale food. After a while he gave it up, decided he was starving and maybe there was enough in the icebox to help an empty stomach. He warmed some potatoes and buttered a roll, but when he had the food ready on the table, he couldn't look at it.

  Maybe coffee would help. He lit a fire under the percolator and sat down at the table and stared at the floor. He turned his head slowly and gazed out the kitchen window. The rain was letting up and he could hear its weak patter on walls and rooftops. If it rained for an entire month it wouldn't begin to clean these miserable tenements, he thought. The ugly cobbled streets like a pock-marked face. And the people. The water-front bums. The human ruins. A perfect specimen was right here in this kitchen.

  The coffee was bubbling. He filled a cup and let the hot black sugarless liquid seep down his throat. It tasted awful. Well, it wasn't the coffee's fault. The mood he was in, anything would taste awful. Even champagne would taste like soapy water. Now what had made him think of champagne? Something had taken him back along the channels of the past, to a time when he had a taste for champagne, when he had the money to afford it. He tried to put the thought out of his mind.

  But memory was growing there, working on him. He saw the steam coming up from the coffee and in the steam the entire business was taking place again, as though projected from an invisible lantern. Cassidy was going back, and back, very far back to the little town in Oregon, and the little house with the little lawn, and the little bicycle. He was back there in the wonderful, glowing days of high school and the roaring grandstands and James Cassidy going in at right guard to plug the hole in the line. And later, James Cassidy at the University of Oregon. At graduation, the yearbook had very nice things to say—“Brilliant achievement in the halls of learning and on the gridiron. Majoring in mechanical engineering, James Cassidy is third highest man in the class. In his final season on the Webfoot eleven, he was selected All-Pacific-Coast Conference guard.”

  Solid, clean-cut James Cassidy. A credit to the old home town. And they said it again in 1943, when he came home after his fiftieth mission. And then he went back to England and piloted the B-24 through another thirty missions. When the big show was over he had his mind made up about his future, and the airline company in New York was only too willing to put him on the payroll.

  A four-engine job. Eighty passengers. The vast green expanse of La Guardia Airport. The smooth, precise schedule of operations. Flight 634 coming in, on time. Captain J. Cassidy reporting. Here's your pay check. A year of it, two years, three years, and then they put him on the transatlantic run. Fifteen thousand a year. In New York he had an apartment in the East Seventies, he wore $125 suits when he wasn't in the sky, he was invited to the better parties, and several of the more elegant post-debutantes were wishing he would look in their direction.

  When it happened, the authorities said it was inexcusable. The newspapers called it one of the worst tragedies in the history of aviation. The big plane was taking off, getting into the air at the far end of the field, when it had suddenly nosed over to crash in the marshes and instantly explode. Of the seventy-eight passengers and the crew, there were only eleven survivors. And the only surviving crew member was the pilot, Captain J. Cassidy.

  At the hearing, they just stared at him and he knew they didn't believe him. Nothing he could say would make them believe him. But it was true. It was dreadfully true that the copilot had suffered a sudden emotional collapse, the kind that gives no warning, the ghastly fusing of negative elements that causes a man to break up as earth breaks up when a quake hits. The copilot had turned on Cassidy, pulled him away from the controls, grabbed the controls, and sent the plane downward when it was less than a hundred feet in the air.

  The authorities sat there and listened, and then without saying a word they were calling Cassidy a liar. The newspapers said he was worse than a liar. They said he was trying to fix the blame on an innocent dead man. The family of the dead man insisted there was not the slightest trace of emotional instability, and certainly no reason for a sudden breakdown, and they demanded that Cassidy be punished. A great many people were demanding that Cassidy be punished, especially when someone offered the information that Cassidy had attended a champagne party the night before the accident.

  That was the way they explained it. They brought in experts to elaborate on the physiological effect of champagne. Stressing the fact that champagne is tricky in its aftereffects; that a man can drink a glass of water on the morning after and start getting drunk again. They put it that way. They said that was it. They told Cassidy he was finished.

  He couldn't believe it. He tried to fight it. But they wouldn't listen. They wouldn't even look at him. It was bad enough in New York, but when it happened in the little town in Oregon he began to realize the full impact of personal tragedy. A week after he left Oregon he started to drink.

  There were times when he fought with all his power to stop the drinking, and on some of these occasions he succeeded, and he went out and looked for work. But his name and his face had appeared in papers across the nation, and they told him to get out and get out fast. Once they tried to throw him out bodily and it ended in a brawl and he spent a week in jail.

  The downhill process was steep and rapid. During a chaotic stretch of drinking, he decided the hell with all of them, and went to Nevada and started to gamble. He had saved a little more than ten thousand dollars from his years with the airline, and in Nevada, at the dice tables, it took him exactly four days to lose every cent. When he left Nevada, his means of transportation was a freight train.

  Nevada to Texas, and he found work on the Galveston water front. But someone recognized him and there was another fight, and he came out of it with a broken nose. In New Orleans he did ten days for vagrancy, and in Mobile he put three men and himself in the hospital and then did sixty days for assault and battery. In Atlanta it was vagrancy again and he was put with the chain gang for twelve days. He talked back to a guard and got his nose broken for the second time and had three teeth knocked out. In North Carolina he hopped a freight that took him to Philadelphia and he spent a few weeks in the tenderloin around Eighth and Race, then tried the water front for a job. He found part-time work as a stevedore, rented a small room near the docks, and begged himself to stay put and keep working and quit drinking.

  But he hated the work and he hated the room, and because he had reached the point where he was hating himself, he decided he needed the drinking. During his third week on the job he walked into a water-front saloon named Lundy's Place, an establishment of dirty floor and cracked walls and disorganized human beings. He ordered a shot of rye. He ordered another shot. He was on his third drink when he saw the bright purple dress and the way it bulged and the way she was sitting there, looking at him.

  He walked toward the table. She was sitting there alone. He asked her what she was looking at. Mildred said he'd be a lot prettier if he had a few more teeth in his mouth. He told her how he had lost the teeth. Eight or nine drinks later he was telling her everything. When he was finished with it, he looked at her and waited for her reaction.

  Her reaction was a shrug. A few nights later, when he asked her to come to his room, she shrugged again and got up and they walked out together.

  On the following day, Cassidy visited a dentist and was measured for a bridge of three teeth. Within a month the teeth were fitted nicely in his mouth and he was married to Mildred. Their honeymoon was a five-cent ferry ride across the Delaware River to Camden. A few days later, Mildred told him to go out and look for a full-time job. She said he might be able to find work with one of the small bus companies on Arch Street. Cassidy took a walk up Arch Street and went into the depot and knew it was the kind of outfit that has trouble staying on its feet. He knew they weren't going to ask him a lot of questions about himself. The questions they did ask were easily answered. He gave them his right name, his right address, and when they asked him about his previous bus-driving experience, there was no need to lie. At college, he'd worked part-time as driver of a school bus.

  They said all right, and that afternoon they gave him a cap and he took eighteen passengers to Easton. He came back that night to tell Mildred of his good luck, but instead of going directly to the flat, he decided to stop in at Lundy's Place for a drink. Approaching Lundy's he saw Mildred and a few other women and men come staggering out, all drunk as blazes. In that moment he laughed deep inside himself, knowing it was a case of what the hell, it didn't matter, he couldn't expect anything better. The important thing was, he had the bus. It wasn't as big as a four-engined plane, but it was a rolling machine, and it had wheels. And he was at the controls. That was the thing that mattered. That was what he needed. More than anything. He knew he had lost the ability to control Cassidy, and certainly he would never be able to control Mildred, but there was one thing left in this world that he could and would control. The one thing that was real, that had meaning and stability and purpose. The thing that allowed him to grip a wheel and shift gears and come as close as he would ever come to the dimly remembered days of piloting a liner in the sky. It was only an old, battered, broken-down bus, but it was a damn good bus. It was a wonderful bus. Because it would do what he wanted it to do. Because once again J. Cassidy was in the driver's seat.

  He had felt good about it that night and now, as he looked down at the steaming black coffee, he managed to capture some of that same feeling. He still had the bus. He was still in the driver's seat. He was still in charge of the passengers. At Lundy's he was just another bum, and in these rooms he was merely another creature of the water front, but in the bus, goddamnit, he was the driver, he was the captain. They were depending on him to get them to Easton. And in Easton they depended on him to bring the bus safely to Philadelphia. They needed him behind the wheel.

  He'd have a drink on that. He hurried into the parlor and found a bottle with some whisky in it and took a generous gulp. He expanded his chest and took another drink. A toast to the captain of the ship, the pilot of the plane, the driver of the bus. Now then, a toast to Captain J. Cassidy. And a toast to the four wheels of the bus. Or better yet, drink a toast to each wheel. Everybody drink. Come on, everybody. Drink! Drink!

  Cassidy threw the empty bottle at the wall. It crashed and he saw the spray of flying glass. He laughed wildly and lurched out of the flat. It had stopped raining but the streets were still wet, and he grinned at the glimmering pavement as he staggered along the water front toward Lundy's Place.

  3

  He moved toward Lundy's with his mind dampened and softened, the whisky fumes swirling in his head and dulling his eyes. There was no thought or purpose other than the fact that he was on his way to Lundy's to have a drink. To have several drinks. As many drinks as he wanted. And nothing would prevent him from getting where he was going. He was on his way to have himself some liquor and they'd better not get in his way. He had no idea who “they” represented, but whoever “they" were, “they” would do well to tend to their own business and give Cassidy a clear path ahead to Lundy's Place.

  On the river side of Dock Street the big ships rocked gently on the black water like monstrous hens, fat and complacent in their roosts. Their lights twinkled and threw blobs of yellow on the cobbled street bordering the piers. Across Dock Street the stalls of the fish market were shuttered and dark, except for cracks of light from within, where purveyors of Delaware shad and Barnegat crab and clam and Ocean City flounder were preparing their merchandise for the early-morning trade. As Cassidy passed the fish market, a shutter opened and a mess of fish guts came sailing out, aimed at a large rubbish can. The fish guts missed the can and landed against Cassidy's leg.

  Cassidy moved toward the opened shutter and glowered at the fat, sweaty face above a white apron.

  “You,” Cassidy said. “You look where you're throwin' things.”

  “Aw, shut up,” the fish merchant said. He started to close the shutter.

  Cassidy grabbed the shutter and held it open. “Who you tellin' to shut up?”

  Another face appeared within the stall. Cassidy saw the two faces as a double-headed monstrosity. The two faces looked at each other and the fat face said, “It ain't nothin'. Just that liquored-up bum, that Cassidy.”

  A hand reached out to close the shutter. Cassidy kept it open. “All right,” he said, “so I'm liquored up. So what? You want to make an argument out of it?”

  “Go on, Cassidy. Go on, take a walk. Go on down to Lundy's with the rest of the slime.”

  “Slime?” Cassidy jerked hard on the shutter so that its hinges whined in protest. “Come out here and call me slime. Come on out here!”

  “Whatsa matter, Cassidy? You aggravated? You have another fight with your wife?”

  “Leave my wife out of this.” He pulled harder on the shutter. The hinges began to give way.

  The fat face became alarmed and angry. “Let go that shutter, you drunk bastard—”

  “Oh,” Cassidy said, and he laughed. “Is that what I am? I didn't know. Thanks for telling me.” He gave a vicious yank at the shutter and the hinges came away from the wall. He staggered back with the weight of it. The two faces were emerging from the stall window. Cassidy hurled the shutter at them and they withdrew with a split second to spare as the shutter went flying into the stall. Cassidy heard the crash, the shouts and curses. He knew they wouldn't come out after him because a similar incident had happened once before, and on that occasion he had closed the left eye of the fat man and knocked the other man unconscious. In a way he regretted that they weren't coming out. He was itching for a solid session of violence.

  He turned away from the fish stall and continued down the pavement. The issue with the shutter had sobered him sufficiently so that he had a better perspective of what his plans were. His plans focused more on Mildred than on additional liquor. He intended to find her in Lundy's Place, drag her out of there, take her home, and force her to cook him a decent meal. Goddamnit, a man who did a hard day's work had a right to a decent meal. And then in the bed. The identity of Mildred was erased as he thought of the bed and what would happen in the bed. In terms of what would happen, of what he would be doing and with whom he would be doing it, there was no thought of Mildred, only the thought of Mildred's physical equipment.

  And yet, thinking in those terms, he was hit again with the uneasiness, the puzzlement. His brain continued to clear as he recalled her unusual behavior, the fact that she had refused battle, had walked out in the middle of an argument. She had never done that before. What was wrong with her? What new trick was she trying to pull?

  He stopped his forward progress and leaned heavily against a brick wall. Better think about this. Better try to get it clear. It wasn't anything to pass over lightly. It was a serious matter. Came under the heading of what they called a domestic problem. Sure, after all, this woman Mildred was married to him. She was his wife. The ring on her finger could be hocked for two bucks, but it was a wedding ring and it had been put there in the presence of a bona fide justice of the peace. A legal ceremony at three in the morning in Elkton, Maryland. According to law and according to God's will, as the man had said. Nothing underhanded about it. A completely legitimate marriage and she was his lawfully wedded wife and he had his rights and she'd better wise up to that and not get any fancy ideas.

  Anyway, what was she beefing about? He brought home his money each week, paid the rent on time, saw to it that she had clothes to put on her back. If part of the cash went for liquor, it was by mutual consent, and she drank as much as he did, sometimes more. Come to think of it, when it came to finances she was gaining much the better part of the bargain, because she was always getting part-time jobs as a hairdresser and he never questioned her about the money she made. Chances were, she spent every dime on whisky, as she'd probably been doing before he met her.