34
PARTISAN REVIEW
used to the new place. He had to ask Jake where things were kept.
He was sure the Hurlbut family was on the way to bankruptcy and
hell. But Jake had his eye on the times and knew better: he expanded,
catered to the city people, added a restaurant. He was making a lot
of money and could have fired Mark with no trouble at all.
"Get that meat in out of the sun!"
Mark put the meat in the truck.
"Love, huh?" It sounded threatening.
"What?"
"Tweet tweet," said Jake, sly, ponderous. He laughed- a power–
ful bass- twirled grandly on his heel and rolled back into the store.
Mark looked at the hills: hay, sun, peach orchards, men at work.
What for? What was he working for? It seemed to him that at some
time he must have had a dream for himself but he could not remem–
ber it. There must have been some picture of what he would become,
very successful and definite, so that people would have said There
goes Mark Bradley the way they said There's HURLBUT'S CRUISING
STORE: He would have made money, made love, become a Selectman
perhaps. Would have bought fine clothes for his girl. ... He must
have imagined at some time how all that was done, and now it had
drifted off and turned to nothing, like Dave's music and Dave's voy–
ages. Perhaps he had dreamed of getting out of that town-yes, he
had watched the trains at Millboro, he remembered
that,
had felt
their gallop in his blood and said: in another year, two years-and
then had seen his brother come back jobless, full of smutty stories,
sallow-eyed. David playing in the Town Hall just like when he was
a child, only he was not a child any more, he was not anything.
"Hey! Mark!"
Another load. He hauled it iri and sat down beside it.
He thought: there'll be a million other loads before I'm dead.
He began counting them dizzily-so many cases a day, days
in
a
month-until he felt squashed under an eternity of cans. And what
for? Eighteen a week.
What for?
He thought of Jake, for a moment
1:magined himself as Jake: portly, paunchy, his power sitting heavy on
him like a big meal, the little fat pink corners of his mouth going cruel
over a question of credit,
his
massive cheeks twisting crookedly at a
dirty joke. No dream, that, nothing you'd want to be if you could,
and you can't, ever.
r
ou're
going to spend the rest of your life piling
canned food, thousands of tons of it, into Jake's CRUISING STORE, and
if you asked for a two-dollar raise Jake would simply ... smile. Every–
one would: Mark Bradley is nobody, a pale-faced tin-can-stacker, he
almost doesn't exist.
"Hey! Come out of the clouds for Christ's sake!"
