Partisan
Review
~ Anvil
JUNE
1936
The Bloodletting
GERTRUDE DIAMANT
PETE CARNEY used to be a driver for a trucking
place just around the corner from 4 Thompson ...
twenty years of it, and after there was no work for
him, he'd still go into the place every morning and
stand there and shout: Well, how's the rush? Only
there wasn't any rush ...
only a couple of sour
bosses, sitting around with their feet on the desk,
gloomy, digging toothpicks into their teeth.
Then Pete stayed home and tried to figure out
what hit him. He sat at the window all day, huddled
up as though he was sick, trying to figure out. He
said the trouble was, goods weren't moving. He said
the trouble was, the niggers came up from the South
with their own trucks and grabbed off the business.
They didn't have any expenses or any families, and
they just slept in the trucks at night and grabbed off
the business cheap. He said he'd like to have one of
them under his hands, they ought to be beaten up
and run out of the state.
Pete's a short man with steel-hard arms, short
and square-built, no strength wasted in gaining
height. They had him down in the relief office for
a wife-beater. He did give his wife one shiner, and
it worried him. He used to say, God forgive him,
it was the only blow he ever gave the missus in
twenty-five years of married life. It happened on
the day she went to the relief office and came home
with the application. He didn't want her to go, and
it was practically like telling him she'd given up
hope he would support her again, the way he did
for twenty-five years of married life. And not being
able to deny it, he got sore and loosed his fist on
her
j
and, God forgive him, he was sorry the minute
it happened. So the relief people had it in for Pete,
especially because his wife is such a poor-looking
thing, a woman who has to fight for breath when
she climbs the stairs, making sounds as if she's
choking and crying. To hear her, you'd think it's a
dog coming up, spent and winded, with its tongue
lolling out.
PARTISAN
REVIEW
Then there are the two sons, both taller than
their father. Tom, the older, almost a six-footer.
Vincent is shorter, but he's still a good head above
Pete. Most of their growing was done in prosperity.
When the lean times came, it couldn't change the
length and breadth of bone on them, but their bodies
can't make enough flesh. They're tall fellows, but
shamefully thin.
In their twenties ...
young men without work,
sitting around all day like useless things, hands hang-
ing empty between slack knees. It was seeing red
for Pete, when he saw them sitting that way. Sup-
per time, he'd rise at the table and shout for them
to get out. They didn't know what started him. They
didn't know, and they knew ...
how it was eating
on him all day, his anger, his defeat. How he had
to vomit it out or it would choke him.
Tom, the older, wouldn't take it. Whose fault,
he would shout back, whose fault
I
Starting up and
spinning his chair back, swearing he wouldn't come
to table any more, he'd eat in the kitchen, where
the old man's eyes wouldn't be on him, poisoning his
mouthfuls. Swearing he'd go off on the road, because
home was a place that didn't want him any more,
and they would know he was alive only by the pic-
ture-post-cards coming from way out in the west
somewhere. Then, because his mother's face was
turned toward him, because her eyes were on him
with their hang-dog sadness, he would sit down
again and draw his plate to him, and mutter away
the rest of his anger.
But Vin, the younger, only smiled and sat with his
hands in his pockets, shoulders squared easy against
the back of his chair. Smiled and looked at his fa-
ther. There were certain things in this world that
Vin knew. About himself. Take the weight of him,
the reach, the measure of biceps flexed and un-
flexed, the measure of chest expanded and chest
normal-take those figures and add them together,
and what do you get? A fellow with the born build
of a lightweight, a natural, a guy who might be a
second Canzoneri. Hell yes, it was depression and
all that, but you couldn't sit around moping. There
were times that couldn't be better, made you forget
all the days of looking for work, tramping the streets
until you're leg-weary and ·sick to the stomach to
hear the big boss-mouths dropping out the same old
crap. After the workout, for instance ...
when he
stood under the shower and felt the water quench-
ing the fire under his skin, until his skin was marble-
cool and hard, and to move was light as flying. And
Tom Prenty standing there and telling him how
lousy his lead was, and next time to listen, for God's
sake, and lead only with his left. So Vin would sit
there, looking at his father and smiling, and think
how the ringside seats might hit fifteen or more, and
his father sitting first-row and hating to remember
the times like these.
There was a year's difference between the two of
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