The Centaurus

Cattycorner across from the trophy case with its hundred highlights, Zimmerman’s door is shut. As Caldwell strides by, it pops open and Mrs. Herzog steps out at a slant under his nose. She is as startled as he; her eyes widen behind her cockeyed butterscotch hornrims and her peacock-feathered hat sits crooked as if with shock. She is, from Caldwell’s height of age, a young woman; her oldest child has just reached the seventh grade. Already, ripples of protective agitation are spreading upwards from this child through the faculty. She got herself elected to the school board to guarantee personally her children’s education. From his professional heart, Caldwell despises these meddling mothers; they haven’t a clue as to what education is: a jungle, an unholy mess. Arrogantly her mouth in its blurred purplish lipstick refuses to frame a smile of confessed surprise, instead remaining ajar in frank amazement, like a stuck letter slot.

Caldwell breaks the silence. An urchin’s impudence, revived from deep in his childhood by the forgotten sensation of nearly having his nose socked, dimples his face as he tells her, Mrs. Herzog of the school board, “Boy, the way you came out of that door reminded me of a cuckoo clock!”

Her air of interrupted dignity, ridiculous in one not yet out of her thirties and leaning her weight on a doorknob, freezes the harder at this greeting. With glassied eyes he resumes his walk to the end of the hall. Not until he has bucked open the wire-reinforced double doors and started down the steps under the yellow wall where since yesterday the word fuck has been scrubbed away, does the fist sink “into his stomach. His goose, cooked. What in hell had the pushy bitch been doing in there? He had felt Zimmerman’s presence behind her in his office, a dark cloud; he could feel Zimmerman’s atmosphere through a keyhole. She had shoved open the door like a woman making a point at her back and not dreaming her front was exposed. Caldwell in his present state ca

The herd has deserted Minor’s. Only three persons in habit the luncheonette: Minor himself, Joh

Beside her, Minor methodically twists his coarse white cloth into the steaming throat of each Coca-Cola glass before he sets it down on the towel he has spread beside his sink. Each glass continues to give off a few wisps of mist as the cool air licks it. Through his window, which is begi

“Minor,” Peter calls from his booth, “you’re old-fashioned. There’s nothing wrong with Communism. In twenty years we’ll have it in this country and you’ll be happy as a clam.”

Minor turns from the window, dome flashing, brain raging. “If old FDR had lived we’d have it,” he says, and laughs angrily, so that his nostrils spread under the burst of pressure. “But he went and killed himself, or else he died of syphilis. God’s judgement: mark my words.”

“Minor, you don’t believe that. You couldn’t be sane and believe that.”

“I believe it,” Minor says. “He was rotten in the head when he went to Yalta or we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now.”

“What fix? What fix, Minor? This country is sitting on top of the world. We got the big bomb and we got the big bombers.”

“Arrrhh.” Minor turns away.

“What fix? What fix, Minor? What fix?”

He turns back and says, “The Ruskies’ll be in France and Italy before the year’s over.”

“So what? So what, Minor? Communism has to come, one way or another; it’s the only way to beat poverty.”

Joh

Minor comes back in his narrow runway behind the counter the better to address the boys in their dim booths. “We should’ve kept marching when we hit the Elbe and taken Moscow when we had the chance. They were rotten and ready for us, the Russian soldier is the most cowardly in the world. The peasants would have risen up to greet us. That’s what old Churchill wanted us to do, and he was right. He was a crook but clever, clever. He didn’t love Old Joe. Nobody, in the world loved Old Joe but King Franklin.”.Peter says, “Minor, you really are insane. What about Leningrad? They weren’t cowardly then.”

“They didn’t win it. They did not win it. Our equipment won it. Our tanks. Our guns. Sent courtesy free parcel post by your good friend FDR; he robbed the American people to save the Russians who then turn right around and are ready to march this minute over the Alps into Italy.”

“He was trying to beat Hitler, Minor. Don’t you remember? Adolf H-I-T-L-E-R.”

“I love Hitler,” Joh

“Minor loved him too,” Peter says, reedy-voiced with fury and hot in all his limbs. “Didn’t you, Minor? Didn’t you think Hitler was a nice man?”

“I never did,” Minor says. “But I’ll tell you this. I’d rather have Hitler alive than old Joe Stalin. There is the Devil Incarnate. You mark my words.”

“Minor, what do you have against Communism? They wouldn’t make you go to work. You’re too old. You’re too sick.”

“Bam. Bam” Joh

“Minor,” Peter says. “Minor. Why do you exploit us poor teenagers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal? You’ve got the board of the pinball machine tilted so steeply nobody except Dedman can get any free games out of it and he’s a genius.”

“I am a genius,” Dedman says. “They don’t even believe in a Divine Creator,” Minor states.

“Well, my God, who does?” Peter exclaims, blushing for himself but unable to halt, so anxious is he to pin this man who with his black Republican stupidity and stubborn animal vigor embodies everything in the world that is killing Peter’s father; he has to keep Minor from turning his back, he has to hold, as it were, the world open. “You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. Really.” Yet in this boast, now that it is issued, Peter perceives an abysmal betrayal of his father. In his mind he sees his father slip into a pit stu