Ironweed by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

Rosskam the ragman came here today looking for a helper. I’ve sent him men from time to time and I thought of you. If you’re serious about quitting the hooch you might put a decent penny together.”
              “Ragman,” Francis said. “Doin’ what, exactly?”
              “Going house to house on the wagon. Rosskam himself buys the rags and bottles, old metal, junk, papers, no garbage. Carts it himself too, but he’s getting on and needs another strong back.”
              “Where’s he at?”
              “Green Street, below the bridge.”
              “I’ll go see him and I ‘preciate it. Tell you what else I’d ‘preciate’s a pair of socks, if you can spare ‘em. Ones I got are all rotted out.”
              “What size?”
              “Tens. But I’ll take nines, or twelves.”
              “I’ll get you some tens. And keep up the good work, Franny. Nice to see you’re doing well too, little lady.”
              “I’m doing very well,” Helen said. “Very exceptionally well.” When he walked away she said: “He says it’s nice I’m doing well. I’m doing just fine, and I don’t need him to tell me I’m doing well.”
              “Don’t fight him,” Francis said. “He’s givin’ me some socks.”
              “We gonna get them jugs?” Rudy asked Francis. “Go somewheres and get a flop?”
              “Jugs?” said Helen.
              “That’s what I said this mornin’,” Francis said. “No, no jugs.”
              “With six dollars we could get a room and get our suitcase back,” Helen said.
              “I can’t spend all six,” Francis said. “I gotta give some to the lawyer. I figure I’ll give him a deuce. After all, he got me the job and I owe him fifty.”
              “Where do you plan to sleep?” Helen asked.
              “Where’d you sleep last night?”
              “I found a place.”
              “Finny’s car?”
              “No, not Finny’s car. I won’t stay there anymore, you know that. I will absolutely not stay in that car another night.”
              “Then where’d you go?”
              “Where did you sleep?”
              “I slept in the weeds,” Francis said.
              “Well I found a bed.”
              “Where, goddamn it, where?”
              “Up at Jack’s.”
              “I thought you didn’t like Jack anymore, or Clara either.”
              “They’re not my favorite people, but they gave me a bed when I needed one.”
              “Somethin’ to be said for that,” Francis said.
              Pee Wee came over with a second cup of coffee and sat across from Helen. Pee Wee was bald and fat and chewed cigars all day long without lighting them. He had cut hair in his younger days, but when his wife cleaned out their bank account, poisoned Pee Wee’s dog, and ran away with the barber whom Pee Wee, by dint of hard work and superior tonsorial talent, had put of of business, Pee Wee started drinking and wound up on the bum. Yet he carried his comb and scissors everywhere to prove his talent was not just a bum’s fantasy, and gave haircuts to other bums for fifteen cents, sometimes a nickel. He still gave haircuts, free now, at the mission.
              When Francis came back to Albany in 1935, he met Pee Wee for the first time and they stayed drunk together for a month. When Francis turned up in Albany only weeks back to register for the Democrats at five dollars a shot, he met Pee Wee again. Francis registered to vote twenty-one times before the state troopers caught up with him and made him an Albany political celebrity. The pols had paid him fifty by then and still owed him fifty-five more that he’d probably never see. Pee Wee was off