234
PARTISAN REVIEW
Around the truck comes the driver not actually stamping his feet but
his face gave that impression as of a job well done and that's that. Various
changes moved flexibly about the monumental plinth of the nose. He dis–
missed the cigar butt to the leaves and spat forcibly. He slapped together his
moleskin gauntlets. He too saw the boy.
Dick goes down to him. This kind of day can leave a young fellow a
bit wobbly in the knees.
The man pulled off his gloves and tossed them to the squared fender.
When he chucks the boy up, earth, truck, trees awhirl, awheel, Dick feels
again how Uncle Anders once long ago picked him up by a railroad train,
an engine with its own bright wheels and rods. High up, Dick sees the
windshield, the sloped green bonnet. It must have been the slanting sun
was still strong between the houses, for the nickled little statue fairly glit–
tered. A frog? No, a cubistic canine, rampant, spike-collared and bug-eyed,
prognathously grinning into Dick's high-held face.
"That's Mack the Bull Dog."
Dick urged his throat to growl in the wonderful way the truck driver
did. "Mack," he croaked. Even a child-no especially a child-can sense a
man's power or lack of it. Naperalski's canvas coat sleeves and his ten fin–
gers, the biggest Dick would ever see life-long, told him at once that this
man would never let fall anything he had taken up least of all a small boy.
So he soared. His now perfectly tranquil face passes the apparently ever–
tranquil plump face of Nat. Dick's ear is at the driver's mouth.
"Mack don't never give up."
And then, that is all. The coal truck ponderously gets under way, chain
and sprocket, Dick returns the wave from its tall shining cab, it tacks into
the street. Dick stands at the porch spindles like any Admiral at his taffrail
on the broad seas and takes his final salute from the air horn. So now we
too may retire, some of you perhaps ascending from our so variously float–
ing lookout levels to move on up to the high slopes of light where the
immortal ones have their eternal dwellings, so men say, with never wind
nor rain, no snow clouds stain those heavens, so calm, where the happy
gods and goddesses live their endless days of pleasure. Or we go elsewhere,
you that way, we this. Which is better we cannot tell.
