It wasn't until John Ferron's name was put in the police charge register and the newspaper that people remembered that there was such a person. He was an employee of a large insurance company, frowning and dutiful, clumsily moving his massive body between filing cabinets. When the cuffs of his white shirt are rolled up, you can see that he has a gold watch on one wrist and a military identification wristband loosely on the other, a legacy of a more courageous and casual era. Ferron was twenty-nine years old, burly and strong, with meticulously combed brown hair, a pale face, and a melancholy countenance. His eyes were kind except for his widening eyes when he was confused and his eyes narrowed when he was threatening, and his mouth was always slightly open childishly, except for biting his lip when he spoke viciously. Usually, he likes to wear a simple blue coat with straight shoulders and buttons wide open. He had steel plates on his heels, and as he walked along the road, his heavy steps made a crisp sound. He lives in Sanisad, Queens, and has been married to a girl named Rose for ten years. She was skinny, had sinus headaches, couldn't have children, and earned more money than him by typing eighty-seven words a minute without chewing gum.
Five nights a week, from Sunday to Thursday, Mr. and Mrs. Ferron sat at home playing cards or watching television, and sometimes she would ask him to buy a sandwich or potato salad for a late-night snack before going to bed. On Friday, the last weekday of the week, there is usually a boxing match on TV in the evening, and he spends the night with his friends at the Island Bar not far from Queen Street. People there become friends more out of habit than out of mutual choice. For the first half hour, they stood around unnaturally, saying foul language to each other and taunting everyone who came in ("Oh my God, look who's coming!"). But by the end of the boxing match, they usually made a lot of jokes and drank merrily, and on Friday nights it usually ended with singing and swaying at two or three o'clock in the middle of the night. On Saturdays, Ferron would sleep in the morning, help with household chores in the afternoon, and spend the rest of the day with his wife: they would watch a movie in the nearby cinema, and after watching it, they would sit down in the ice cream parlor, and they would usually go to bed before 12 o'clock. On Sunday, he lazily flipped through the mess of newspapers in his living room, and then his next week began.
That particular Friday, if it weren't for his wife's insistence on breaking his routine, perhaps nothing would have happened at all: That night was the last night of Gregory Peck's movie release, and she said she couldn't see any reason why he couldn't watch professional boxing once in a while in his life. She told him this Friday morning, the first of all things that were wrong that day.
For lunch — at noon on payday, he always eats lunch with three colleagues in his office at a German tavern in the center of the city — and everyone else is talking about boxing, and Ferron rarely interjects. Jack Kopek, who knows nothing about boxing (he said last week's fight was "a great fight," when in reality, for the entire 15 rounds, both sides just twisted their opponents, defended cowardly, and the final decision score was laughable), rambling to the crowd that the best full-round fight he'd ever seen was in the Navy. Then the whole table began to talk about the navy, and Ferron writhed boredly in his seat.
"I was then," said Kopec, poking his chest with a well-trimmed thumb, ending the third long story, "and I was on the new ship on my first day, and I did nothing but stand there in a custom-made navy blue uniform. Are you scared? God, I'm shaking like a leaf. The veterans walked around, looked at me, and said, 'Where do you think you're there, sailor?'
"Speaking of inspections," said Mike Boyle, his clown-like eyes wide. "I tell you, we have a commander who will put on his white gloves and brush his fingers over the bulkheads, brother, if there is a little dust on the gloves, you will be dead. ”
Then they started to get sad. "Ah, that's a good life, Navy," Kopec said. "Clean life. The best thing about being in the Navy is that you're somebody, you know what I mean? Everybody has their own independent job to do. I mean, hell, all of you in the Army are just dangling around, like everyone else, looking stupid. ”
"Big brother," said George Walsh Jr. as he smeared mustard on German garlic, "you're right. I was in the Army for four years, and trust me, you're right. ”
At this point, John Ferron's patience was at the end of his patience. "Really?" he said. "What kind of army unit is that?"
"What troops?" said Walsh, winking. "Oh, I spent some time in the Ordnance Corps, in Virginia, and then I went to Texas, and Georgia - what do you mean, what troops?"
Ferron's eyes narrowed, and he pouted. "You should try the equipment of the infantry unit, brother," he said.
"Oh, well," Walsh said submissively, smirking rather than smiling.
But Kopec and Boyle were not convinced, and grinned at him,
"Infantry?" Boyle said. "What do they have - infantry specialists?"
"Of course you can say they're experts," Ferron said. "Every bitch in the rifle company is an expert, and if you want to know anything, I'll tell you one thing, man—they don't have to worry about not having silk gloves, no tailor-made clothing, and you can bet your life on that. ”
"Wait a minute," Kopek said. "There's one thing I want to know, John. What's your specialty?"
"I'm a Browning automatic rifleman," Ferron said.
"What's that?"
For the first time, Ferron realized how much the people in the office had changed over the years. In the past, if anyone who didn't know about the Browning Automatic Rifle in the 49 or 50 years and was with the old gang, they would have shut up.
"Browning automatic rifle," said Ferron, putting his fork down, "it's the B.A.R." Caliber 3.0, detachable magazine, fully automatic fire, is the main firepower of a rifle squad of twelve people. Are you satisfied with this answer?"
"What do you mean?" asked Boyle. "Like a submachine gun?"
Ferron had to explain again, as if talking to the children or girls, that it was a very different submachine gun, that its tactical function was completely different, and at last he had to take out a mechanical pencil and, with memory and love, draw the outline of the gun on the back of the envelope containing the salary.
"Well," said Kopec, "tell me, John." What do you need to know to shoot with this gun? Do you have to have special training, or something?"
Ferron's eyes narrowed into a slit in anger, and he tucked the pencil and envelope back into his coat. "Let's try it sometime," he said. "Try it, walk twenty miles on an empty stomach with a Browning automatic rifle and ammunition belt on your back, and then lie down in the swamp, the water floods your ass, and you are pressed to the ground by machine guns and mortars and you can't lift your head, but then the squad leader yells at you, 'Rack me up the Browning automatic rifle!' You have to cover the retreat of the whole platoon or company. Try it sometimes, man—you'll know what you're going to get. He took a big sip of beer, choked and coughed, squirting onto his big speckled hands.
"Relax, relax," Boyle said with a laugh. "Don't push too hard, man. ”
But Ferron only wiped his mouth and looked at them angrily, panting.
"Well, you're a hero," Kopec said contemptuously. "You are a warrior. Tell me one thing, John. Have you fired this shot yourself in battle?"
"What do you think?" said Faelon's thin lips as he didn't move.
"How many times?"
In fact, Ferron was the strongest and most capable soldier in his class of nineteen, and was named "Best Browning Automatic Rifleman" by the rest of his class several times. Two months before the end of the war, he carried his gun on his shoulder, walked through countless miles of roads, fields and forests with his blistered feet, lay down under the dense net of artillery fire and mortars, and poked it into the chest of a newly captured German prisoner of war;
"How many fucking times have you fucked!" he said, and the others looked down at their plates, smiles on their faces. He glared angrily and looked at them defiantly to see who dared to make fun of him, but worst of all, none of them said anything. They ate and drank beer in silence, and after a while, they changed the subject.
Ferron didn't smile all afternoon, and he was sullen until he met his wife at a supermarket near his home for their weekend shopping. She looked tired, and she always did that when her headaches were about to get worse. He shuffled behind her with a cart and turned his head to stare at the writhing ass and plump boobs of the other young women in the mall.
"Wow!" she cried, dropping the Lotz biscuit, rubbing her heel in pain. "You're pushing that thing, can't you watch where it's going? You'd better let me push it. ”
"You shouldn't stop all of a sudden," he told her. "I didn't know you were going to stand all of a sudden. ”
After that, in order to make sure that the car would not hit her again, he had to pay full attention to her narrow body and thin legs like matchsticks. From the side, Rose Ferron always seems to lean forward slightly, and as she walks, her ass floats, indecently separated from her body, as if it were a separate part behind her. A few years ago, the doctor explained her infertility because her uterus was tilted and told that it could be corrected by an exercise session, and she did it for a while with little interest and soon gave up. Ferron might not remember whether her strange posture was the cause or the result of the tilting of her womb, but he was sure that, like her sinus headache, which had grown worse over the years since they had been married, he could swear she had stood up straight when they first met.
"Do you want crispy rice or Posta toast, John?" she asked him.
"Crispy rice. ”
"Oh, but we only ate it last week. Haven't you gotten tired of eating?"
"Well, the other kind. ”
"What are you muttering? I can't hear what you're saying. ”
"I say, Posta Toast!"
As he walked home, he was panting more than usual with a full load of food in both hands. "What's going on?" she asked as he stopped to change hands.
"I don't think I'm fit anymore," he said. "I'm supposed to go out and play handball. ”
"Oh, honestly," she said. "You always say that, but you have nothing to do all day but read the newspaper. ”
She took a shower before making dinner, and when she ate, she put on a huge lounge coat and tied it with a strap, and as usual, she looked messy after a shower: wet hair, dripping with water, dry skin with enlarged pores, and a circle of milk marks on her upper lip, no lipstick, no smile, as if she were laughing. "Where do you want to go?" she said as he pushed the plate away and stood up. "Look at there - there's a full glass of milk on the table. Truth be told, John, I bought milk for you, and I did, and you left, leaving a full glass of milk on the table. You come back and drink it. ”
He walked back, gulped down the milk, and felt disgusting.
After eating, she began to carefully prepare for the evening outing, he had already finished washing the dishes and drying the dishes, and she was still standing in front of the ironing board, ironing the skirt and blouse she intended to wear to the movies. He sat down and waited. "If you don't move yet, it's too late," he said.
"Oh, don't be stupid. We're almost an hour away. Besides, what's wrong with you tonight?"
Her stilettos look quirky under her ankle-length home robe, especially when she hunched over, spread her figure-of-eight feet, and pulled the iron plug from the wall.
"Why did you give up those workouts?" he asked her.
"What workout? What are you talking about?"
"You know," he said. "You know that. Exercises to do for your house tilts. ”
"Womb," she said. "You always say 'several houses'. It's the womb. ”
"What the hell does it make when you give up?"
"Oh, to tell you the truth, John," she said, folding up the ironing board. "For the sake of old talent, why are you mentioning this now?"
"So what do you want to do? Do you walk around with a sloping womb for the rest of your life? Or is there something else?"
"Well," she said, "of course I don't want to get pregnant, if that's what you want to say." Can I ask where we live if I quit my job?"
He stood up and walked around the living room furiously, staring angrily at the shadows of the lamps, the watercolors of flowers, and a small porcelain figure, a sleeping Mexican, with a flowering dried cactus behind him. He walked into the bedroom, her clean underwear spread out on the bed, ready to wear for the night, he picked up a white bra with latex sponge cups, without it, her breasts were as flat as a boy's. She came in, and he turned to face her, bra straight up to her frightened face, and said, "Why are you wearing this?"
She snatched the bra from his hand, leaned her back against the door frame, and looked him up and down. "Well, listen," she said. "I've had enough. Do you want to be decent? Do you want to go to the movies?"
Suddenly, she looked so pitiful that he couldn't bear to look at it. He grabbed his coat and passed by her like a gust of wind. "Do whatever you want," he said. "I'm out," he slammed against the apartment door.
It wasn't until he swayed down to Queen Street that his muscles relaxed and his breathing calmed. He didn't stop at the island bar - anyway, it was too early to watch the boxing match, and besides, he was in a bad mood and didn't want to watch it. So, he taped down the subway stairs, swept into the carousel, and headed straight for Manhattan.
He vaguely wanted to go to Times Square, but he got off the subway at Third Avenue because he was thirsty, and up the street, he drank two beers at the first bar he saw, which was bleak, with embossed tin walls and the smell of urine. In the bar, on his right, an old woman dances like a baton with a cigarette in her hand, singing "Peg, My Heart," and on the left-hand side, a middle-aged man is talking to another, "Well, my opinion is: Maybe you can disagree with McCarthy's approach, but, son of a bitch, you can't question him on matters of principle." Am I right?"
Ferron left the place and went to another bar near Lexington, decorated in chrome-tanned leather, and in the soft light, everyone was blue-green-blue-green. He stood beside two young soldiers, the number of the troops was discerned by their armbands, their boat-shaped caps folded under their shoulders, and the infantry regiment to which they belonged. They didn't wear medals—they were still children—but Ferron could see that they weren't recruits: first, they knew how to wear Eisenhower jackets, short and tight, and their combat boots were soft, black, and shiny. The two of them turned their heads suddenly, and looked past him, and Ferron, too, turned with them, and watched with them as a girl in a tight brown skirt left the table in the shadowed corner. She clinged to them, muttering "borrowed" in her mouth, all three heads drawn to her hips, watching it wriggle and twist until she disappeared into the women's bathroom.
"Hey, that's a lot," said the shorter soldier, grinning at them, including Faelon, who grinned back.
"Laws should be enacted to prohibit that kind of twisting," said the taller soldier. "Disturb the morale of the military. ”
Listening to the accents, they were from the West, and they were all the kind of blonde, squinted-eyed, country boy faces that Ferron remembered from his old class. "What troops are you from?" he asked. "I should know that number. ”
They told him, and he said, "Oh yes, of course - I remember." They're from the Seventh Army, right? '44 or 45?"
"I can't tell, sir," said the short soldier. "That was long before us. ”
"Where did you get a 'sir' from?" asked Ferron enthusiastically. "I'm not much of an officer. I was a private at best, except that they had me serve as an acting corporal for a few weeks, and that was when I was in Germany. I'm a Browning automatic rifleman. ”
The short soldier looked him up and down. "Needless to say, I know," he said. "You're a Browning automatic rifleman. That old-fashioned Browning automatic rifle is fucking heavy. ”
"You're right," Ferron said. "It's heavy, but, I want to tell you, it's fucking good in battle. I said, "Do you two have something to drink?" By the way, my name is Johnny Ferron. ”
They shook hands with him, muttered their names, and when the girl in the short taal-colored dress came out of the women's bathroom, they all turned their heads to look. Seeing her sit back in her seat, this time, they were concerned about the fluttering in her bulging blouse.
"Hey," said the short soldier, "I said, good pair of waves." ”
"Probably fake," said the tall soldier.
"They're real, kid," Ferron assured him, wincing his eyes, looking old-fashioned, and turning back to his beer. "They're real. If it's fake, I'll be able to see it from a mile away. ”
They drank a few more rounds of wine and talked about the army for a while, and then the tall soldier asked Ferron how to get to Central Square, where he had heard that there was a Friday Jazz Night, so they got into a cab and drove all the way down Second Street, the fare of which Ferron paid. As they stood in the central plaza waiting for the elevator, he laboriously removed the wedding ring and stuffed it into his watch pocket.
The spacious, tall ballroom was crowded with young men and women, hundreds of young people sat around a table with a bunch of beer, listening and laughing, and nearly a hundred young people dancing wildly in the open space surrounded by rows of chairs. In the distance, in the orchestra pit, a group of black and white musicians sweated and played hard, their various pipes flashing in the smoke and light.
Ferron stood lazily in the doorway, and to him all jazz music was the same, but he posed as a connoisseur, his tense face shining in the cacophony of clarinet, his fingers snapping to the beat of the drum, his knees slightly rhythmic, and his bright blue trousers shaking. He led the soldiers towards the table next to the table where the three girls were seated, and it was not the music that fascinated him, nor did the music invigorate him, but when the band changed a certain soft tune, he immediately asked the prettiest of the three girls to dance. She was tall and slender, a dark-haired Italian girl, with a slight sweat on her forehead. She walked ahead of him, weaving from table to table and toward the dance floor, while he reveled in the grace of her slowly squirming crotch and fluttering skirt. In his ecstatic, beer-drunk mind, he was already imagining what it would be like to bring her home—what it would be like for his hand to caress her in the intimate shadows of a taxi, and then, at the end of the night, her naked body heaving in a dimly lit bedroom. As soon as they stepped onto the dance floor floor, she turned around and raised her arms, and he immediately pressed her tightly against his warm body.
"Oh, listen," she said, hunching back angrily, so it was obvious that his hands were tightly wrapped around her wet neck. "Is this what you mean by dancing?"
He let go of the way, shuddered, and grinned at her. "Relax, dear," he said. "I'm not going to bite you. ”
"Don't call me 'dear,'" she said, and she said these words until the dance was over.
But she had to stay with him anyway, for the two soldiers had moved over and huddled with her two feisty, giggling female companions. They were now at the same table, and for more than half an hour, six people were seated, immersed in the restless atmosphere of the party: the short soldier was biting her ear with one of the girls (both of whom were small blonde girls), who was laughing loudly, and the tall soldier's long arms were around the neck of the other. But the tall black-haired girl of Ferron, reluctantly told him that her name was Mary, and then sat down beside him stiffly and stiffly, and with a moment and then fastened the bag that lay on her knee, opened it again, and fastened it again. Ferron's fingers gripped the back of her chair tightly, her joints white, but whenever he tentatively put his fingers on her shoulder, she would immediately shrug her shoulders and dodge.
"Do you live around here, Mary?" he asked her.
"The Bronx," she said.
"Do you come here often?"
"Even Favorite."
"Want to smoke a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke. ”
Ferron's face was feverish, and a thin vessel in his right temple could be seen twitching, beads of sweat rolling down his ribs. He was like a boy on a first date, her warm clothes so close to him, the smell of her perfume, the way her slender fingers opened and closed on and off her handbag, her plump lower lip glistening wetly, all of this made him clumsy and unable to utter a word.
At the next table, a young sailor stood up, put his hands together to his lips in the shape of a trumpet, and roared at the orchestra pit, which was picked up by the rest of the room. It sounded like, "We want saints!" but Ferron didn't understand what that meant. But at least it gave him a chance to speak. "What are they shouting?" he asked her.
"Saints," she told him, just enough time to meet his eyes to convey the message. "They are going to listen to the Saints. ”
"Oh. ”
After that, they didn't say anything more for a long time, until Mary made an impatient face at her nearest female companion. "Hey, let's go," she said. "Let's go. I want to go home. ”
"Ah, Mary," said another girl, her face flushed from the beer and flirting (she now wore the boat-shaped hat of a short soldier). "Don't be so stupid. However, when she saw Ferron's anguished face, she tried her best to help him out. "Are you in the army too?" she asked cheerfully, leaning over across the table.
"Me?" said Ferron, startled. "No, I—but I was. I've been out of the army for a long time. ”
"Oh, really?"
"He used to be a Browning automatic rifleman," the short soldier told her.
"Oh, really?"
"We want Saints!" "We want Saints!" Now, in the whole ballroom, people are shouting in all directions and corners, and the voices are getting louder and more urgent.
"Hey, let's go," Mary said to her female companion again. "Let's go, I'm tired. ”
"Let's go," said the girl in the soldier's hat unhappily. "If you want to go, you go, Mary. Can't you go home alone?"
"Don't, wait, listen—" Ferron snapped up. "Don't go yet, Mary—I'll tell you. I'll go buy some more beer and come back, okay?" Before she could refuse, he had already run away.
"Don't buy it for me," she shouted at him behind him, but he was already three tables away, and walked briskly towards the wing of the room, where the bar was. "Bitch," he whispered. "Bitch. Whore. As he stood in line at the makeshift bar, the imaginations that tormented him intensified with anger: a physical struggle and torn clothes in the taxi, brute force in the bedroom, choking moans turned into whimpering, and finally lewd spasms and moans. Oh, he's going to let her relax! he's going to let her relax!
"Hurry, hurry," he shouted to the guy behind the bar who was clumsilyly dealing with draft beer, beer corks, and wet bills.
"We—to—'Saints!'" "We—to—'Saints!'" the shouts in the ballroom reached their peak. Then, the drum beat smashed into a relentless, rough rhythm that became almost unbearable, until it ended in a burst of cymbals, which was replaced by the rough sound of a brass band, and the crowd went wild. It took Ferron a moment to realize that the band was now playing "The Saints on the March," when he finally turned around from the bar and walked back with a draft beer.
The place is now a madhouse. The girls screamed, the boys stood on their chairs and yelled, their arms fluttering, glasses smashed, chairs spinning, and four policemen stood vigilantly against the wall to prevent rioting, as the band played the tune safely.
Be a saint
On the march
Oh, when the saints are on the march......
Ferron shoved and shoved and panicked his way through the hustle and bustle of the crowd, trying to find their group. He found their table, but he couldn't be sure if it was theirs—it was empty, except for a crumpled cigarette case and a pile of beer stains, and an overturned chair. He thought he had seen Mary in the crowd dancing wildly, but later it turned out to be another tall brunette girl in the same dress. Then he thought he had seen a short soldier, gesturing at him at the other end of the room, and he squeezed through it, but it was another soldier with the face of a country boy. Ferron spun around, sweating profusely, searching through the dizzying crowd. There was a boy in a sweaty pink shirt, one staggered, slammed into his elbow, cold beer spilled on his hands, sleeves, and he realized that they were gone. They dumped him.
He went out into the street, walking at a brisk pace, his steel heels slamming heavily on the ground, and the sound of cars at night sounding emergingly silent after the roaring and jazz commotion. He walked aimlessly, and had no sense of time, except for the heels of his shoes to the ground, except for the tugging of muscles, except for the trembling and inhaling air, and spitting it out, he felt nothing but boiling blood.
He didn't know if it had been ten minutes or an hour, twenty blocks or five, but after that, he slowed down and stopped at the edge of a small crowd. The group was huddled in a lighted doorway, and the police were waving at them.
"Go ahead," said a policeman. "Please move forward. Don't stop. ”
But Ferron, like most others, stood still. It was the entrance to a lecture hall—he knew it was because the lights inside were dim enough to make out the words on the bulletin board, and the marble staircase must have led to the auditorium. But it was the cordon that caught his attention the most: three men of his age stood, their eyes shining with justice, wearing the golden-trimmed boat-shaped hat of some veteran organization, holding a placard that read:
Thoroughly investigate this Fifth Amendment Communists
Professor Mitchell went back to Russia
American fighters protested against Mitchell
"Go ahead," the police officer said. "Go on. ”
"Civil rights, my God," a flat voice muttered at Ferron's elbow. "They should lock this Mitchell up. Have you read what he said at the Senate hearing?" Ferron nodded, remembering that frail, pretentious face had appeared in many newspapers.
"Look over there—" The muttering voice continued. "Here they are. They came out. ”
There they were, coming down the marble steps, past the bulletin boards, and onto the sidewalk: men in raincoats, greasy tweed jackets, arrogant manners, girls in leggings who looked like they were from Greenwich Village, a few black men in the middle, and a few neat, somewhat embarrassed male college students.
The demonstrators leaned back and stood silently, holding up placards in one hand and holding into a fist with the other: "Phew——! Phew——!"
The crowd followed: "Bah——!" "Bah——!" Someone shouted, "Go back to Russia!"
"Go ahead," the police officer said. "Go ahead. Keep going. ”
"He's coming," the muttering voice said. "Look, he's coming—that's Mitchell. ”
Ferron saw him: a tall, extremely thin man, dressed in a cheap double-breasted suit, which was a little larger for him, carrying a briefcase in his hand, and two glasses-wearing, average-looking women walking on either side of him. This is the pretentious face of the newspaper, and he slowly looks from side to side with a serene, detached smile on his face, as if to say to everyone he meets: Oh, you poor fool. You poor fool.
"Kill this bastard!"
A few of them turned their heads to look at him quickly, and Ferron realized that he was screaming, and then he only knew to keep yelling, over and over again, until his voice was hoarse, like a child crying: "Kill that bastard! Kill him! Kill him!"
He shoved and dashed in four strides to the front of the crowd, but one of the demonstrators threw down the placard and ran up to him, saying to him, "Relax, man, relax—" but Ferron pushed him aside and scuffled with another, and he broke free again, grabbed the front of Mitchell's coat with both hands, and tore at him like a crooked puppet. He saw Mitchell's face shrink back on the sidewalk, and his wet lips were filled with horror. When the policeman's blue arm was raised high above his head, he remembered nothing but absolute satisfaction and total relief.
Translated by Chen Xinyu
# Writer Bio
Richard Yates (1926-1992), American novelist. He is "the great writer of the Age of Anxiety" and the spokesperson of the United States from the thirties to the sixties of the last century. His debut novel, The Road to Revolution, was an instant success and was nominated for the National Book Award that year, along with Catch-22 and The Movie Lover. In 1962, his first collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Solitude, was published, and he was known as "The Dubliners of New York". He then wrote Disturbing the Peace (1975), Easter Parade (1976), The Good School (1978), Young Hearts Are Crying (1984), Cold Spring Harbor (1986), and his last novel, The Age of Indefiniteness, has not yet been published.