The Bell Tolls for No One Read Free

We’d see some man or woman walking down the hall and they would reek of the death and the plague and the vomit of sell-out, and I’d feel it but stand silent in some morning hangover shade, rather cleaved in half again about how low the human being could descend without effort. And I’d be thinking this thing and then I’d hear her voice: “That son of a bitch! I can’t STAND him! He makes me sick!” Then she’d laugh and she always made up some nickname for the creature—like Greenjaws or Anteyes or Deadears.
    But to get on with it, one time we were sitting around our room drinking our port wine and she said, “Ya know, I think you’d like to meet the F.B.I.” She worked as a maid in the place and knew the roomers.
    â€œForget it, sweetie,” I told her, “I’ve already met the F.B.I.”
    â€œWell, o.k.”
    We gathered the half empty wine bottle and the two or three full ones and I followed her down the hall. It was the darkest hall of hell, dozens of people leaning up against the wallpaper, all behind in the rent, drinking wine, rolling cigarettes, living on boiled potatoes, rice, beans, cabbage, hogshead soup. We walked a little way down and then Jane knocked, the insistent little knock that said: this is not trouble.
    â€œIt’s Jane. It’s Jane.”
    The door opened and here stood a fat little bitch, rather ugly, a bit dangerous, demented, but still all right.
    â€œCome in, Jane.”
    â€œThis is Hank,” she introduced me.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    I came in and sat down in a straightback chair and one of the ladies went around filling the large waterglasses full of deathstink wine.
    Meanwhile, in the bed, unintroduced, sat, no sprawled , was this male creature ten years later than I.
    â€œWhat goes, shithead?” I asked him.
    He didn’t answer. He just looked at me. When you get a man who doesn’t care to rejoinder in common conversation, you’ve got a wild one, you’ve got a natural. I knew that I was in deep. He just SPRAWLED there under that dirty bedsheet, wineglass in hand, and worse, he looked quite handsome. That is, if you think the vulture is handsome and I think that he is. It is. He had the beak and eyes of living and he lifted that glass and ran the wine down his throat, one run down, all that deathstink wine, without a blink, since I was the heaviest drinker born in the last two centuries there was nothing for me to do but throw that filthy poison into my stomach, hold mentally to the sides of the chair and keep the straight pokerface.
    A refill. He did it again. I did it again. The two ladies just sat and watched. Filthy wine into filthy sadness. We went around a couple more. Then he started to babble. The sentences were energetic but muddled in content. Still, they made me feel better. And all the time, this big bright electric light overhead and these two drunken madwomen talking about something. Something.
    Then it happened—the sprawl was over. He pushed upward in the bed. The beautiful vulture eyes and the big electric light was upon us. He said it very quietly and with easy authority.
    â€œI am the F.B.I. You are under arrest.”
    And he would arrest us all, his woman, mine, me, and that was all. We would submit, then, the rest of the night would go on. I don’t know how many times in the next year that he put me under arrest, but it was always the magic moment of each evening. I never saw him get out of bed. When he crapped or urinated or ate or drank water or shaved, I had no idea. Finally, I decided that he just didn’t do these things—they happened in another way, like sleep or atomic warfare or snow melting. He realized that the bed is man’s greatest invention—most of us are born there, sleep there, fuck there, die there. Why get out? I tried to make his woman one night but she said that he would kill me if he ever found out. That would have been one