America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw Page A

mallards which never leave us. A blue heron lives on our shore, a friend and neighbor named Poor Harry. He stood on one leg, his head scrunched down, his long sword of a beak hidden in his breast feathers. Because he stands upright, he turns his back to the wind to keep his feathers down, a pitiful, doleful-looking bird. In the sterling silver of the moon-white night, the ice cricked and rustled on the falling tide. And O, the limbs of the oaks were as black against the sky as those Sung paintings in ink made from fir smoke and the glue from wild asses’ hides. Jack pines were yellowy from the cold, and the naked grape vines hung like ragged spiderwebs on the white walls of the garage. Far away, almost like Aurora Borealis, the winking town lights of Sag Harbor put up a dome of glow.
    Most of the houses in sight were closed up for the winter. We walked about on the Point, our feet crunching through the crusted snow, and it was a joy to see the lights of the cottage, and to smell the pine smoke of the new-built fire.
    The Fly is a hot trumpet boy. He roared up the phonograph, and with head thrown back and glazed eyes, he sat in and belted out riffs with some of the best sidemen in the business.
    Tingler unpacked his drawing board. We are designing a catamaran entirely new in principle and method which will undoubtedly make our fortune, and we can use it—a fortune, I mean.
    Best not to describe our dinner. Strong and competent women have been known to flag and fail at our menus. We finished, however, with our spécialité de la maison, known as pousse capudding, a handsome dessert made by pouring every known kind of do-it-yourself pudding in layers, black, white, pink, yellow, green.
    The Fly was a good hour away from his trumpet. He cooked the dinner and he cannot play while eating. Pudding gums up the valves. He took his ease while The Tingler and I cleaned the kitchen—not the dishes, the whole bloody kitchen. The Fly had prepared his Sag Harbor mignon, which puts up a mushroom cloud of real mushrooms and has a fallout of hamburger particles.
    The Tingler is in what has been called his God and Girl Period. Sometimes he can’t tell them apart. I remember it myself, a kind of half-strangling sensation and sudden urges to laugh or weep and an outer layer of utter cynicism for show.
    I asked, “How’s the girl situation?”
    â€œJust the same,” he said. “You’ve either got too many or none at all. I don’t know which is worse. Makes you insecure.”
    â€œAnd it won’t get any better,” I reassured him.
    â€œI wish I didn’t love them so much,” he said, “ ’cause I hate ’em.”
    â€œWell, at least you didn’t invent them. Look, I know I didn’t get all the grease off those plates, but you might do me the honor of wiping it off. How’s your religion? Still aiming to be a Catholic?”
    â€œI’m an atheist,” he said.
    â€œThat’s a hard religion to live up to. Better leave yourself an escape hatch for walking under ladders and wishing on the new moon.”
    â€œI don’t believe in anything,” he said fiercely.
    â€œHallelujah! What’s her name?”
    â€œHelen.”
    â€œA brute, eh?”
    â€œA bitch,” said The Tingler.
    â€œShall we join The Fly? At least he believes in C-sharp minor.”
    â€œHe’s just a kid,” said The Tingler.
    He was watching a newborn fly, his namesake, crawling heavily up the new-warmed windowpane. “Say,” he asked, “how much does it cost an hour to fly a jet 707?”
    â€œI don’t know. Pretty much, I guess. Why?”
    â€œOh, nothing.”
    Then I heard the sound too—the droning cry of a flight of jets from an airfield not far away. We went outside to look for them and they flew across the white face of the moon. Then they crashed the barrier with a sound that always makes me think the furnace has exploded.