Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  LIFE DRAWING

  Michael Grumley

  From Life Drawing, a novel in progress

  IN FEBRUARY OF MY LAST HIGH SCHOOL YEAR, I came home from wrestling practice, went straight to my father’s liquor cabinet, and finished off half a bottle of Old Crow. My parents were out, and my younger brothers were at a party with their grade-school chums; I was alone, and got drunk and headed for New Orleans. Liquor was fuel for my impulse, and it kept me warm through the wet afternoon and evening. I recall I started out down by the railroad tracks, imagining I’d be able to find a boxcar that was headed south. Prowling among the ice-encrusted railway cars, I soon realized they were locked in for the night, if not the season. The local freight train I’d heard all my life didn’t make a full stop in Lillienthal as I’d always imagined it did—it slowed but continued its rattling journey at a non-negotiable clip, and running along beside it, I cursed its speed and heedless girth. I had to leave town, would leave town, though I couldn’t say why. The whiskey kept me chuckling to myself as I trudged along the tracks. It was warm in New Orleans wasn’t it? That was reason enough.

  From the tracks I followed the curving highway till it came to the river. Down on the levee at night, the men who worked on the paddle-wheelers heading downriver to Memphis and the Gulf would congregate. When we were younger, our parents had taken my brother Franklin and me for walks along the levee, holding us up so we could look out over the loading of boats, the movement of winches and barges. My friend old Don Hammer sometimes worked on the levee, and when I was delivering newspapers he’d tell me about the accidents he’d seen, when a bale had fallen on a man and paralyzed him for life, about a novice struck with a baling hook, a captain knocked overboard and nearly swept away. His accounts were gleeful, filled with the blood and thunder of a catch-as-catch-can life. The levee in winter was bleak—truck drivers collected around a drum fire: half a dozen men with dark faces, walking up and down, stretching their legs before they crossed the bridge and took the highway south through Illinois, down into Missouri, finally Arkansas, Louisiana. The river was open, and a barge was drawn up at the end of the loading pier. How long it had been moored there was hard to tell. Next to it stood the River Queen, and as I moved closer to it, I could see light in its cabins, and men moving along the passageways and decks. The River Queen churned up and down the Mississippi during the summer months—once I’d gone for a ride on it with my girlfriend Sammy. A band had been playing, and it was great fun slipping and sliding on the dance floor as the current changed and the band changed with it. But I’d never thought about where it went or what it did during the winter when no pleasure-seekers queued up at the dock, no wedding parties waited to be carried away.

  It must have been about nine o’clock at night now, and the damp winter rain was beginning to put a chill in my robust traveling plans. Steam rose up from the water, or a kind of fog. Laughter came from on board, and the smell of soup and cigarettes drifted out of the portholes.

  I stood on the dock, watching the mysterious motions of the figures in the dark as they passed back and forth. Cigarettes lighted up like fire-flies, lengths of white rope were tossed here and there.

  The door of the cabin nearest the gangplank burst open then, and out of the swirl of swearing and yelling and the clank of pots stepped a figure I was sure I recognized. Not many black men were in my acquaintance—hardly any black families lived in Lillienthal—and so for a moment I pictured the faces I knew, or had only seen. With the light behind him it was hard to see his features, but after another second I was sure who it was and called out his name, Horace!

  He squinted down the gangplank. “Who’s that calling my name?” he demanded, stepping closer to the edge. He looked at me curiously—hundreds of caddies must have worked at River Hills Country Club the same years I did, and just because he worked upstairs in the locker room, why should he remember me after all?

  “Are you Horace?” I asked, suddenly unsure of myself, and at the same time feeling dizzy. The smell of kerosene and of the muddy river came up from the space between us, and I put my hand on a timber that stood next to the gangplank to steady myself. Whiskey flowed through me.

  “Horace Olibanum Jefford, that’s right. And if you know my name, you might as well come on inside, and tell us what you’re doing, wandering around this old levee looking like a half-drowned river rat. Come on, step lively now!” He reached over and pulled me across, and I stumbled a little, and then was inside the cabin he’d stepped out of, amid tied-up bedrolls and wicker trunks and pans hung on a long trestle.

  “This here is Sneezewood McKenna, and Ralph Scott. And this nasty looking creature is my son James—don’t you call him Jimmy—and somewhere or t’other is Curtis Stringfellow.”

  The men, who were seated around a table in the middle of the cabin, looked up from their cards, and mumbled howdy, all except James who just stared at me close-mouthed. They were smoking and the smoke was like a canopy over the table. Next to it was a stove as big as a sofa, a sink, and vegetables and fruit in baskets, all in what seemed like one pile against the wall.

  “Well?” Horace raised his eyebrows, finally put out his hand.

  I came to myself enough to mumble my own name, and to tell Horace I’d seen him at the Club. I said I was going to New Orleans.

  At this the other men looked up again from the table, and one of them, I think it was Sneezewood, said: “People all the while dying to conic up north; what do you want to be heading the other direction for?” There was a pause. “Of course,” he continued, going back to his cards, “some folks have more trouble traveling than others.”

  Horace said, “Now now … ,” and I suddenly felt foolish, and thought what am I running off for, me so white and comfortable and all?

  Then the boat gave a heave, as if the barge had bounced against it. “Current’s turning. Better get at it,” Horace said and gave me a quick look. “You want some coffee.” He took a cup from the trestle and a pot from the stove and put me off to the side to drink it. The boat moved again, and the men lay down their cards and together moved out the door.

  “You, Caddy … you stay here, and when we get back we’ll talk about New Orleans!” He winked at James, who hadn’t got up with the other men, but stayed at the table, his face rocking in the light, looking at me out of the brownest eyes I’d ever seen.

  James was eighteen, which meant he could drink and work on the river as a dealer. He was on his way south “to do a little business.” When I knew him better, and kidded him about the phrase, he’d laugh back at me, his laughter coming out from behind one of the cheroots he was always smoking. Cards were his business, and had been from an early age.

  He got up from the table, and I could see he was taller than me by an inch or so, but rangy and wide-shouldered, with long arms. I thought of a spider.

  “My papa doesn’t know I’m in the life, so don’t say nothing.” He was rinsing out his glass at the sink as he said this, not looking at me, and his words fell from nowhere, floated in the thick sweet air. He was shaking his head, and after a moment he did turn. He came back and took another look at me.

  “You know what I mean?” he asked.

  I didn’t, exactly—but I was excited in a way I hadn’t been excited before, and waited to hear what else he might say.

  “Forget it,” he finally said, and sat down again.

  Then Horace came back in and put on a yellow slicker over his jacket, and said the river was rising.

  “So what about it, young bub? What’s waiting for you in New Or-LEANS?” He stood at the door, expecting an answer.

  “I’m going to school down there—college,” I said, getting ahold of a lie by the tail and starting to twist it. “I go to Tulane University, and I had to come home for a while—and now I’m going back.”

  Father and son looked at one another, and then looked back at me.

  “Well, that sounds right,” said Horace.

  James had pulled out a nail file an
d was moving it across his nails, frowning down at his hands. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Horace said, “James here is headed down that way himself. You sure you’re not running away from something? No officers of the law after your little tail?”

  Sneezewood came back in the cabin and, hearing Horace, made a loud guffaw. Then he put his lips together and shook his head.

  “What do you think we got here, a convicted felon?” He and James laughed.

  “You never do know,” Horace put in mildly, and seemed satisfied no trouble would come sniffing his way. He sat down at the table and picked up the cards: “All right, then. When that barge gets done bumping up against us and knocking off my brand new paint, it’s going down the river. And James is going to be on it, and the captain—he’s a real bulldog—can surely take along another boy if I say so.” He pulled a card out of his hand and flipped it on the table. “And I guess I say so.” He looked at James. “That all right with you, James?”

  James spread his hands apart, shrugged his shoulders, said “Makes me no never mind,” and then giving it up, showed me a wide grin.

  The cabin rocked once more, Curtis Stringfellow made his appearance, blocking the doorway, as big and important as the night itself—then James and I were down the gangplank, and across another one, and on our way.

  The river was wide and long. By the time we got to the Missouri border the next day I felt like I’d been on it all my life. We kept out of the way of Captain Eugene, who regarded us as no more or less interesting than the cargo—soybeans from Clinton, wheat and alfalfa.

  We slept next to the boiler that night, and nothing we said could be heard over its clanking, the repeated stanzas of iron grating against iron. I woke up once and saw James watching me —we weren’t very far apart, one bunk space between us. He offered me a drink from a little silver flask he carried in his jacket, and I took it from him just so I could touch his skin. I couldn’t go back to sleep then; we both were half-sitting up, with the early morning light slipping in, and as long as he was looking at me I was looking at him—like we were both laughing, but neither of us was even smiling. The boiler chugged on, leaving no room for words; I sat up all the way and leaned across to him to hand back the flask. He took it, and kept hold of my hand with it, and the current ran through both of us until we bounced toward each other, and that was that.

  I saw I knew nothing at all about giving somebody pleasure, and I tried to do better, again and again. James was pleasure. Hot, snake-smelling skin, knots of muscles hitting me like snowballs, breath like gin and jasmine—he was everything at once.

  Whatever I’d been going to New Orleans for, I’d found by St. Louis. When we finally got out on deck—which wasn’t a deck at all but a big flatiron field moving through the water, lines looped all across it, and nowhere to walk but along the gangways—the captain grunted good morning, and the ugly little river towns spilled out their undersides like bunting. I was ready to take on the world, whatever the world happened to be.

  But by then I was also thinking about my family, wondering what they were thinking. James told me he lived off and on with his mother in Chicago, and didn’t see his father but once or twice a year—he’d been staying on the River Queen with him for a week, before starting downriver to ply his trade on the gambling boats there, and he had older brothers that he never saw. He was so out in the world, compared to where I was, that it seemed the world was written all over him. He glowed with it.

  We stood behind the lines. The wind coming up from the south had a chance of spring in it, but the day was cold, no matter the clean white clouds snapping overhead, the bright blue tunnel of sky.

  I took a breath and told him that I wasn’t actually going back to school at Tulane, that I was just going to New Orleans plain and simple.

  He let out a long low whistle.

  “And your mama? She know that’s where you’re bound? Or did you just happen to run off without telling anybody where?”

  As pleased with me as he had seemed in the cabin, now he seemed as angry. He moved away from me and walked along the gangway, and I followed after him.

  When he turned around, it appeared the dark of his eyes had spilled over into the whites, they were so somber, so full of hurt.

  “I thought you and me were going to be a team for a while,” he said. “I thought you were your own man, but now I see you ain’t even dry behind the ears.”

  I was confused, reached out for his arm, but he pulled it away, stood there looking at me with so much reproach I felt I’d fallen overboard and was drowning. Then he relented some, said in a milder tone, “Nobody goes off and leaves their family, less they have a reason. Nobody lets them worry and carry on and wonder if they’re dead or alive. Nobody I want to meet.”

  The softer voice did not ease the weight of his disapproval. I was wretched—my brave freedom, purchased at the price of my parents’ anguish, hadn’t been such a grand thing to achieve after all. Wouldn’t they be calling the hospital and the police by now?

  I must have looked as bad as I felt, for he pulled me to him.

  “Don’t think I want to let you go; but seems like I’m going to have to.” Then he turned me around and pushed me back toward the cabin.

  “Time’s got to be right,” he said, and went to ask Captain Eugene how long before we tied up in St. Louis. And that was how long we stayed in the cabin, pressed together, pulling the future out of each other, sweating and moaning and making sure each of us remembered.

  When we stepped off the barge together, he walked me to a Greyhound bus station and we sat drinking awful coffee till it was time for me to go. I’d got my dad when I called home, and though he was angry, it wasn’t as bad as James being angry, and I didn’t have to talk to my mother at all. Dad let me know he was relieved I was all right. That was the main thing, he said.

  The waitress behind the counter kept her eye on us while we sat there, and I finally realized we were in the South, or nearly. People looked at me more than they looked at James it seemed, and I thought of what Sneezewood had said. I wondered suddenly if James would be all right. I had already made up my mind that I’d come to New Orleans after school was out—then I would be my own man. He had given me his mother’s address, and I had given him mine.

  The bus north was called—I couldn’t understand the announcement, but James could—and we got up and walked toward the gate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him.

  “Well, maybe it’s all right,” he said, smiling, and put his hand on my shoulder. “And I’m sorry, too, for thinking you was in the life …”

  Then I laughed, and said I guessed I was in it now, and he liked that, and that’s how we said good-bye.

  The bus rolled out and I watched him through the window as he got smaller and smaller. We turned the corner, and he was gone.

  The trip down the river stayed with me. I was moving through Liliienthal in fits and starts, waiting for graduation. It was as if I’d been inflated with a gas that had me bobbing through the streets like a circus balloon. New ideas and new faces kept coming to me, rushing down like meteors, littering the front lawn and the fields around me. My parents had been surprisingly philosophical about my running off—my dad blamed it mostly on drink. My brothers thought it odd of me, although Franklin had, a few years back, been discovered with his sheets tied together, ready to step out through the window on Oak Street. We were all prepped for departure: Dad always said he didn’t want any of us living at home once we were grown, that two adult males were too many for any one house. Thinking of this, I wondered if I’d been too sentimental about coming back.