The Zebra Derby Read online

  VESTA (dropping her handkerchief and picking it up): How do you mean, dear?

  MAX (walking over to the table and rearranging a bowl of flowers): Oh, I don’t know exactly. Things just seem different, that’s all.

  VESTA (going over and opening the window): Well, isn’t that natural? Things change in ten years.

  MAX (going over and closing the window): Perhaps you’re right. But I somehow thought that the feeling between two people doesn’t change, even in ten years.

  VESTA (going over and opening the window): Max, are you trying to say that you don’t love me any more?

  MAX: Will you leave that God-damn window shut?

  VESTA (crawling under the table): You used to like to have the windows open.

  MAX (overturning a chair): I used to like a lot of things.

  VESTA (leaping over the settee): Max, let’s face it. You don’t love me any more.

  MAX (climbing up the portiere): Now, I didn’t say that.

  VESTA (somersaulting on the rug): But you meant it, didn’t you?

  MAX (diving into the fish bowl): Let me ask you something. Do you love me?

  VESTA (hurling an andiron through the window): Max, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

  “So for the remainder of the play they discuss the matter, never sitting still for an instant. Running, jumping, leaping, falling, rolling, turning, they agree that their ten years have been happy ones, that they can find no fault with each other, and yet—But let the curtain line speak for itself:

  MAX (swinging from the chandelier): Vesta, I’m afraid the magic is gone.

  VESTA (clawing off the wallpaper): Yes, Max, the magic is gone.

  CURTAIN”

  “All right,” said Yetta. “We’ll start rehearsing Comrade Stagecraft’s new play tomorrow. We’ll open Saturday night.”

  “Do you hear Nature calling yet?” Millie de Agnes asked me.

  “In God’s name, woman,” I said, “will you stop pointing those things at me?”

  chapter twenty

  YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS

  A new play by Max Stagecraft

  Produced and acted by the Bonanza People’s Theater

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  MAX POVERTY—a sharecropper

  MARY ELLEN—his wife

  SWEET ALICE—their idiot daughter

  NO-NOSE NOONAN—her fiancé

  FRANCIS X. PLOITER—the landowner

  THE STRANGER

  BALLET DANCERS, OTHERS

  SCENE

  The cabin of Max Poverty.

  As the First Act curtain rises MAX and his daughter SWEET ALICE are lying on the floor horsing. MARY ELLEN is bent over a black cast-iron pot on the wood stove.

  MARY ELLEN: Hurry and finish horsing, Max. Your vitamin-deficient supper is almost ready.

  MAX (looking up): Were we not oppressed by a capitalistic exploiter, we would have abundant, healthful food.

  SWEET ALICE: Talk or horse, one.

  MAX: And our poor daughter might be a credit to her community instead of a hapless, passion-ridden dolt if we had but had ample money for proper medical care.

  MARY ELLEN: I don’t know, Max. I don’t trust doctors. That, of course, is due to my ignorance, which, in turn, is the result of being forced to leave school at the age of six to wrest a meager living from this nitrogen-poor soil.

  SWEET ALICE: Here comes No-Nose. He’ll horse with me. Enter NO-NOSE, whose name is well deserved.

  NO-NOSE: Howdy, Mr. Poverty. Howdy, ma’am. Howdy, Sweet Alice.

  MAX: Talk plainer, boy. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.

  NO-NOSE: Would that I could, Mr. Poverty. And I would have could had I had money to procure green, leafy vegetables in my childhood and stave off the dread pellagra that caused this nasal havoc.

  Because of NO-NOSE’S condition, his preceding speech and all that follow are unintelligible. All that can be comprehended is a rushing air sound: “WHOOSH.”

  SWEET ALICE: Horse with me, No-Nose.

  MAX: Yes, son. Spell me for a while so I can get something to eat. Although there is no nourishment in this food, it fills one’s stomach.

  MAX rises and NO-NOSE takes up horsing with SWEET ALICE.

  MARY ELLEN: It will be nice when summer is here and Sweet Alice can horse outside. There’ll be more room in the cabin, and then perhaps we can get that spinet you promised me in 1903.

  MAX (ladling himself a plate of soy paste and sitting down): And I mean to get it for you, Mary Ellen. As soon as I can get a few dollars ahead, you’ll have it.

  MARY ELLEN: What a fund of comfort and satisfaction the spinet will be to me, even though I have lost all my aesthetic values in this grueling life to which I have been subjected by the exploitation of moneyed interests.

  MAX: I wish you would wash the pot, Mary Ellen. This soy paste is full of rust.

  MARY ELLEN: You know, Max, how primitive our sanitary facilities are, even though a scarce half mile away is the home of our landowner whose bathroom has been featured for three years now in the annual plumbing issue of Better Homes and Gardens.

  NO-NOSE: Whoosh. (Meaning, “That is only an example of the incidence of luxury beside squalor which characterizes this civilization.”)

  MAX: Rust or not, I must eat. Some more soy paste, Mary Ellen.

  MARY ELLEN: There is no more, and moreover, I can get no more because the crossroads store that is owned by our landowner as well as all other real and personal property on this hectare will no longer extend us credit, and you well know that we cannot purchase for cash.

  MAX: We are undone.

  SWEET ALICE: I am tired. I think I will sleep now and have a dream sequence.

  SWEET ALICE sleeps, and seventeen ballerinas, of whom she is dreaming, enter stage right and perform Millie de Agnes’s spirited “Entrechat de United Nations.” At the conclusion of their dance they form a hammer and sickle stage left, and a man and woman singer come forward. They sing this song:

  GIRL: What can a girl do?

  Not knit one and purl two

  Or sit in a bar like a drunk cur.

  What is a lass for

  But to fight in the class war,

  To grapple, to struggle, to conquer?

  MAN: Is it a man’s place

  To fill up divan space

  Immobile as though he had rickets?

  Where is his honor?

  His mother is yon whore

  If he doesn’t march with the pickets.

  TOGETHER: Masculine and feminine,

  We could pull the Bremen in

  If we all would join hands together.

  Wipe out all capital.

  Let us now map its fall

  And go marching forth in clear weather,

  Clear weather,

  Clear weather,

  And go marching forth in clear weather.

  The man and woman singer step back and the ballerinas dance another chorus and then exit stage right, some reluctantly.

  SWEET ALICE (waking): Ah, I feel refreshed. Let’s horse, No-Nose.

  NO-NOSE: Whoosh.

  MAX: What a pass we have come to, facing starvation while in his house 2,630 feet away, or a trifle under a half mile, our landowner grows sleek on otter haunches and all manner of table goodies.

  MARY ELLEN: If only we had a spinet so that we could starve in a shabby-genteel manner. But even that distinction along with all others is denied us.

  MAX (passionately): Cursed be our landowner, Francis X. Ploiter, and cursed be the archaic socio-economic system that allows such as him to erect a temple of oppression on the traumatic backs of such as us.

  MARY ELLEN: Shh, Max. I hear him coming.

  Enter FRANCIS X. PLOITER stage left. There is no door here; he simply kicks down the wall. He strides into the room and slashes MAX and MARY ELLEN across the face with a riding crop. He sees SWEET ALICE on the floor and kicks NO-NOSE aside and proceeds to horse with her.

  PLOITER: See wh
at power I wield over you? Before your very eyes I take my pleasure with your daughter.

  MAX (aside): That’s one on him. So does everybody else.

  PLOITER (standing up): Now, my loathsome churls, I have news for you. You are being evicted. You owe me a year’s rent and I am throwing you out. I have picked this day to dispossess you because I am advised by the U.S. Weather Bureau in Winston-Salem that rapidly falling temperatures accompanied by snow flurries are due before sundown.

  SWEET ALICE: Come back and horse, mister.

  PLOITER: You have thirty seconds to clear out, and if you try to take anything with you, including the clothes on your backs, four bailiffs are waiting outside to clap you in irons.

  SWEET ALICE (frantically): For God’s sake, somebody come horse with me. Pa, No-Nose, somebody.

  MAX: You go, No-Nose.

  NO-NOSE: Whoosh.

  NO-NOSE horses with her.

  PLOITER: Fifteen seconds now.

  MAX: This is it. Mary Ellen, can you carry Sweet Alice and No-Nose?

  MARY ELLEN: I reckon.

  PLOITER: Eight seconds.

  MARY ELLEN lifts SWEET ALICE and NO-NOSE. They all start for the door, speeded by vicious cuts about the rib case from PLOITER’S riding crop. Suddenly, as they are almost in the doorway, THE STRANGER enters.

  STRANGER: Just a moment. Who is Francis X. Ploiter?

  PLOITER: I am. Who are you?

  STRANGER: (pulling a gun from his tunic and killing PLOITER): I am the people’s commissar for this district. The Communist party seized control of the government in a bloodless coup at ten twenty-five this morning. You are now living in the People’s State. A representative of the Bureau of Bountiful Living will be here shortly and provide you with food, clothing, and health-giving medicaments.

  MAX: Oh, happy day.

  STRANGER: There will also be a spinet for you. Now I must go and ameliorate the equally deplorable conditions among your neighbors. (Exits.)

  SWEET ALICE: Now I will be cured of this unrelenting impulse to horse and go to sociables like a normal American girl.

  NO-NOSE: And I won’t say whoosh all the time.

  MAX: How fine it is to live in the People’s State. What joy there is in the people’s movement, joy in communal labors, joy in sharing the fruits of toil, joy in the folk arts. Strong, bronzed people working side by side, singing as they work, clapping one another on the back with simple heartiness, dancing madrigals in the village green on feast days.

  MARY ELLEN: How my heart sings as I march triumphantly up the people’s way into the sun.

  There is a knocking at the door.

  MAX: That would be a representative of the Bureau of Bountiful Living with food, clothing, and health-giving medicaments.

  MARY ELLEN: And a spinet.

  MAX: Come in.

  He comes in and says:

  Ay’m not representative from Bureau of Bountiful Living and Ay got no food and no spinets, w’atever in hell dat is. Ay’m Qvistbergholm and Ay got eviction papers. You make thirty-day note for dis place and is thirty days gone and is no money and now, by Yesus Christ, you go.

  chapter twenty-one

  And as the setting sun cast its rosy hues over Bonanza, I took my leave of Yetta and her friends and the first American collective. “Aloha, Bonanza, aloha,” I cried as I stood on a hill in the middle distance watching Qvistbergholm and three deputy sheriffs herding the residents out at gun point.

  Unrewarding as it had been, I did not regret the time I had spent in Bonanza. I have a deep-seated belief that anything that happens to you, no matter how bad, is a good experience. You learn from it. For example, once when I was digging for angleworms on our pasture at home, I was kicked in the head by a horse. This was a good experience, because I learned not to dig for angleworms when there are horses about, and since then I have never been kicked in the head by a horse while digging for angleworms. Of course I have been kicked in the head by horses on numerous other occasions, but never for the same thing twice.

  After Bonanza I decided that I would no longer strike out by myself in my efforts to find my postwar position. There was no need for a man to try it alone. After all, there were various government agencies which had been established to aid returned servicemen. A grateful America was turning all her talents to finding security and opportunity for those who had preserved her. Why should I not take advantage of these agencies? Was it not my due?

  So I went to the Veterans’ Administration, where I was sent to the U.S. Employment Service, where I was sent to the Selective Service Board, where I was sent to the Veterans’ Placement Service Board, where I was sent to the Retraining and Re-employment Administration of the Office of War Mobilization, where I was sent to the Veterans’ Service Committee, where I was sent to the Veterans’ Administration, where I was sent to the U.S. Employment Service, where I suddenly had a feeling that I was traveling in a circle.

  I thought perhaps my confusion could be cleared up if I went to some of the veterans’ organizations for information. So I went to the Society of American Veterans, where they sold me a membership and a green uniform with yellow piping on the pants. Then I went to the Council of Ex-Servicemen, where they sold me a membership and a pink uniform with white piping on the pants. At the American Veterans’ Congress they sold me a membership and red uniform with green piping on the pants. At the Ex-Servicemen’s League they sold me a membership and a Zouave uniform with no piping on the pants, and at the American Veterans’ Mobilization they sold me a membership and a long fuchsia tunic, no pants. The Association of U.S. Ex-Servicemen sold me a membership and an off-white uniform with cudbear piping on the pants. At the Benevolent and Protective Order of Veterans they told me that they were about to disband so there was no use to buy a membership, but they sold me three thousand fourragères which they had been unable to dispose of.

  I put on all my uniforms and walked colorfully down the street. Turning a corner, I saw a long line of men attired as I was. They stood in front of a building, motley and multihued, their eccentric striping garish in the afternoon sun.

  “Looks like a zebra derby,” said a policeman standing beside me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Zebra derby,” mused the policeman. “Say, that would make a swell title for a book.”

  But I wasn’t listening. I walked over to the end of the line to question one of the men, but before I could ask him anything he said, “That’s right, Mac. We all been through the mill too. But maybe we’ll get somewhere now. This is a new place, the Co-ordinator of Veterans’ Affairs. Get in line.”

  I got in line with my fellow veterans, and it was good. We talked of old campaigns and repeated tales of feats heroic and comic. Turning to the present, we griped about the food we were getting at home. Then we talked of work and jobs.

  “My name is Jones,” said a man whose name was Jones, “and the first thing I did when I got back was to tell my old boss what he could do with my old job. I didn’t risk my neck fighting this war so I could come back home and work in a grocery store. What lousy, backbreaking, feet-destroying work. And those customers! Jesus, those customers! Addled budget shoppers who think quantity buying is the highroad to economy; when carrots are six cents a bunch, they ask shrewdly, ‘Four for a quarter?’ Impoverished spinsters who claw through your wares looking for something a canary will like that they can eat too. Misers who lurk outside the door until you’re ready to close and then rush in, cast a disdainful look at your vegetable stand, and say, ‘You’ll have to throw all this stuff out in the morning. I’ll give you a nickel for the lot.’ Doubting Thomases who, whatever you show them, say, ‘Let’s see what you got in the back room.’ Food faddists who pester you into ordering twelve dozen cans of goat’s whey and then drop dead of malnutrition before they buy the first can. Nibblers who eat their way through a case of bing cherries while closely supervising the selection of the nickel’s worth of tomatoes they ordered (‘Not too ripe, not too green, no spots, and perfect
ly spherical’). Feelers who bruise the pears, crush the peaches, mash the cantaloupe, and even raise welts on the Hubbard squash. Rascally children who throw their grocery lists down a sewer on the way to the store, come in and buy four dollars’ worth of Hershey bars, and then go home sick and besmeared and swear to their mothers that they gave you the grocery list. Sanitation fanatics who make you wash your hands in a forty-per-cent lye solution and spray you with D.D.T. before they let you wait on them. Great strapping wenches who ask you to carry a bag of potato chips out to their cars four blocks away. Puffy-eyed newlyweds who reel in in the morning and urgently order protein-loaded foods to keep up their husbands’ strength.

  “No sir,” said Jones, “that’s not what I was fighting for.”

  Now spoke up another, Smith, who said, “My sentiments exactly. The first thing I did when I got home was to tell my old boss where to stick my old job. I’m through working on newspapers. Besides working sixteen hours a day and being stalled off with wrestling-match tickets every time I asked for a raise, I worked for a city editor who was an out-and-out maniac. He was unhinged. He thought Time magazine was the ultimate in journalism. He believed that all news should be written as Time writes it. Every noun, he said, must be modified with two adjectives. I used to have to write a simple news story like this:

  “‘Writhing, pain-racked Madeleine Besom, wife of effusive, balding John Charles Besom, both of 1426 long, shady Ashland Avenue, gave birth this bleak gray morning to a yowling, slack-jawed son at six-story, iodoform-reeking Mercy Hospital. Gap-toothed, endemic Dr. Milton Hilton delivered the child with the aid of a gleaming, prehensile forceps.

  “‘Besom is in the seasonal, uncertain holly-wreath business. Mrs. Besom, before their unpretentious, well-attended wedding, was hot-eyed, unmarried Madeleine Sputum of humid, bustling What Cheer, Iowa.’

  “No more of that,” said Smith, “for me.”

  Then a man named Green, an upholsterer, said that he was through with upholstering and had told his old boss what to do with his old job. Likewise Black, a bank teller, was through with bank telling, and Gray, a cobbler, was through with cobbling, and White, a plumber, was through with plumbing, and Blue, a sexton, was through with bell ringing, and all of these had told their old bosses what to do with their old jobs.