Della, seeing this, went to take the order herself. “Go to bed, man,” she told him. He moved numbly toward his room where he emptied his bottle and listened to the sounds of the conversation grow louder and louder. Only the vibration of the record player let him know that it was still going. Once he knew Kilroy was sitting inside, because he heard his loud voice and rapid speech. Kilroy, Hillary thought, was the way they all should be. His clothing was loud too. Kilroy seemed to enjoy being a clown.
Restlessness seemed suddenly to invade the room and Hillary began fingering the money he’d received from Keel. He had been doing pretty well. If he went out now, he wouldn’t really get too drunk; all he’d had was a few drinks to clear away the afternoon with Della. Besides, he hadn’t taken the walk to the Battery as he’d meant to; he hadn’t been out all day.
Of course, there was always the chance that Keel would get angry. He had said “no drinking on the job.” But, Hillary reasoned, he’d been pretty straight and Keel could invite him not to work and live here if he wished. And so what? It was spring.
Hillary lurched up on his feet, shoving the bills down further so they wouldn’t fall out. He crashed into the door of his room, staggered away from it, opened it and took a couple of rubbery steps outside. He walked tense and erect for a few paces, lost his balance and staggered toward a table, pulled himself in, just missing it, and continued without the pretense of being sober toward the door.
Della rushed into the Musicians’ Room to tell Keel.
“I suppose he’s got to have a few, baby.”
“But he hasn’t been like this in weeks.” There was disgust in her voice.
“Maybe something happened today to set him off. I’ll get him later.”
“I hope he doesn’t hurt himself too badly.” she said.
“He might. But that’s not important to him right now. Did he hear from the school again today or something? They tell him no?”
“No, baby. It was I.”
Keel looked squarely at her, his face set “What do you mean?”
“We talked.”
Keel’s lips simulated a tight smile. “White folk’s talk?”
Della nodded. “White folk’s talk,” she said bitterly.
“It had to come,” Keel said with a sigh. “What did you do to him?”
“We just talked. That’s all.”
“Okay, baby. Don’t worry. I’ll get him later.” Keel watched Della walk back to the kitchen and stared after her for a long time.
Outside, Hillary lurched toward the corner where the old lady had just reopened her flower shop. The beat cop, leaning against the corner of the building, saw him stagger by. The cop, who had just come on, had five minutes before he had to report in to headquarters on the call box. As soon as he had done that, he would move off the corner because, if he stayed, he would have to arrest two out of every five persons who passed for public intoxication. Amused, the cop watched Hillary weave on by, hair bedraggled, mouth open as though he could not quite get enough air.
Hillary went past a small bar where the sounds of jazz echoed. He leaned, both hands against the pane of glass, to see inside. “Bums,” he muttered. The sounds were cute, clever, but empty. There was a bar across the street with cracked tile floors and inexpensive bottles of whisky on the shelves. The Friday-night fights were on and Hillary entered without attracting attention. The young bartender gave him a double rye. Hillary wiped his mouth and stared upwards where the set showed the white fighter in the black trunks pummeling the Negro in the white trunks in a corner. Sounds of approval rose from the throats of the watchers. Hillary went out.
Traffic now was a steady series of headlights and whispering tires. Overhead the arms of bright new lights leaned above the street and here and there were planted a few skinny trees. Hillary passed the Salvation Army with a sneer. There were a few men sitting near the corner of Houston and the Bowery—a street slave market where in the morning, employers needing a few men for a day’s work would drive up and pick out the healthiest or the least drunk. Houston Street echoed with the sounds of bocci and handball.
Walking through Chinatown, Hillary saw the young Chinese looking at him without expression; the white dinner-goers gazed through him as if he weren’t there, and Hillary sensed they were ashamed here, in this section, because of him. He emerged from Chinatown and entered the area of darkened buildings—courthouses, municipal, state and federal buildings. He headed across the street to a lone bar, took a double rye—handed distastefully to him by the bartender—and sat down on one of the Foley Square benches. He dozed for an hour.
When he woke he was wet from urine and he had to defecate at once. He returned to the bar, walking (he noted with surprise) without much staggering. He washed and brushed back his hair in the bathroom and left, walking back uptown. Hillary was in mild shock. He had wet his pants and almost ruined them. To have seen this happen to someone else would have been horrible enough, but to have it happen to him was a nightmare come true. He hurried, almost at a dog trot, along the empty streets, sniffing at himself, feeling the clammy wetness of his trousers slopping around his thighs. Not even Eagle did this. Where, he wondered, could he go? Back to the shop and pass through wet and stinking to his room for all to see, Della too?
He slowed. No. More to drink? He toyed with this thought, but remembering the moment when he had almost surrendered control of his body, he rejected it. Eagle’s place? He could change into Eagle’s pants—if he had another pair. They would be big, though. He felt better now and moved more quickly along the street and did not notice Keel coming from the opposite direction until he spoke.
“How you making it, Prof?”
Hillary jumped. Goddamn, he thought, this cat, trying to play God, popping up—he broke off to mumble something.
“What’d you say?” Keel had turned now and was walking beside him. He noticed the wet pants but said nothing.
Hillary shambled along in his rapid pace.
“You surprise me,” Keel said. “I figured you’d be stoned by now.”
Hillary jogged along without answering.
“I wanted to talk to you anyway,” Keel said. “I figured I’d have to sober you up to do it. I don’t have anything but time.”
Hillary didn’t answer.
“Della was worried about you.”
Hillary glanced at him.
“She doesn’t usually worry.” Hillary didn’t answer that either and Keel was overwhelmed with the urge to smash him.
“She doesn’t have to worry,” Hillary finally said.
“That’s the way she is. Wait for the light.”
They stood on the curb without speaking until the light flashed green. They continued on. They had walked a good ten blocks when Keel asked, “How you feel now?”
Perhaps it was the way the question was asked or maybe something within Hillary which at the precise moment the question was asked screamed for help. It could even have been one of those rare times occurring within lives of humans, when understanding strikes with the cleanness and power of a thunderbolt.
“I feel,” Hillary said, “very, very tired, and I’m glad you’re here and glad Della’s worried, though she shouldn’t have been.”
Keel didn’t answer. He was thinking about the urge he had had a moment or two ago.
“I feel like a goddamn fool for saying that,” Hillary said, “but I’m glad I did.”
“So am I,” Keel said. “I don’t know why it is that sometimes we don’t dare express what it is we feel.”
“I’m beginning to learn why.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Then we must talk. Tonight. Shall we go to Eagle’s?”
In the darkness Hillary smiled. Of course Keel had known at once that he would not want to go back to the shop and would want to rest at Eagle’s. The same darkness in which he had smiled hid the frown which came with the thought: had he gone running drunk just to get Keel to look after him? No, there
was that talk with Della.… But was he testing and if so why?
“Watch the light,” Keel warned again.
“I’m watching,” Hillary said grimly. “I can see it. It’s red.”
Keel gave him a strange look, then they crossed the street.
CHAPTER 10
Keel sat patiently while Hillary stumbled around, first in the bathroom, then in the closet looking for a pair of Eagle’s pants. The small flat seemed somehow vast without Eagle in it. Then Keel thought how empty almost everything would be without him.
Hillary had found a pair of pants. They were striped; Eagle favored stripes and plaids, the louder the better. The pants sagged at the waist and at the seat and Hillary, as he approached to take a seat near Keel, smiled down at them ruefully. “Kind of big,” he said.
“Yeah, he’s bigger than he looks sometimes,” Keel commented.
There was a silence while they both lit cigarettes.
“Where do we go from here?” Keel asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You were in pretty bad shape tonight.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“A real running drunk.”
Hillary looked at him.
Keel was rubbing his face. “I can’t put you out, you know.”
Hillary didn’t answer.
“Did you know that?”
“I figured you could anytime you wanted to.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“I guess I was pretty stoned.”
“Anything happen today?” Keel’s eyes revealed nothing, but Hillary sensed that deep within them there stood a veil.
Hillary was the first to mash out his cigarette. “No.”
“I was surprised,” Keel said. “You’d been doing pretty well. I figured something had to get you off.”
“I’ve never lived like this before,” Hillary confessed. “Sometimes it throws me—the people, the things that happen, the hatred, the desperation—the love. I haven’t quite got it into focus.”
“You see,” Keel said, “you don’t belong here. What’s there to focus? You live, you don’t try to figure out why.”
Hillary thought: Why is he trying to frighten me?
Keel thought himself: I’m trying to scare this cat. Why?
Then a slow fright worked loose inside him and he had the answer. He sensed something between Hillary and Della which had somehow gotten out of his control, something which passed—Damn it! Why was he thinking like that?—only between whites.
Hillary said, “Funny, your saying that, because I’ve had mixed feelings. First that I don’t belong here,” (And maybe you’re thinking, Keel thought, that Della doesn’t either.) “and second, that only by being here can I learn to begin to live again.”
“Like an immersion,” Keel said, “a baptism.”
“Of fire.”
“Life,” Keel retorted.
Hillary lit a second cigarette and stared at the floor. “I had a long talk with Della today,” he said, without looking up.
“She told me,” Keel said, without looking at him.
“Oh,” Hillary said. The disclosure startled him. So, he was not making any headway with her. If he had been, she would not have told Keel. Of course, she could not have told Keel everything. Or had she? But no man could be that tolerant if he were in love.
Actually, Keel only knew that they had talked; he had not asked Della the subject of their conversation, nor would he ever. If she wished to tell him, all right, if not, all right. But he did, at the moment, want to know something of what they’d discussed. Not all. He had a fear of knowing all of it; he was afraid it might confirm something he’d felt the past few hours that had given him a sense of uneasiness. He looked at Hillary and the restless way he jabbed his cigarette toward the filthy ashtray.
Hillary was settling in his mind what Della, knowing her as he did, might have been likely to tell Keel. He concluded that it would have been nothing intimately harmful to Keel—or to himself. Now he shrugged. “It was about some things that had been bugging me—and things I’d been bugged about.”
“Ummm,” Keel said. He jabbed in the dark. “So, how does it feel, working for me?”
Hillary looked up with a’ smile. He had to remind himself that this man was sharp. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “it doesn’t feel as good as it should.”
“That’s natural, I think.”
“Is it? Is it natural that I should feel bad about working for another human being who happens not to be the color I am?”
“That’s not the scene,” Keel said.
Hillary didn’t answer. The probing that afternoon from Della had been enough. He might admit to Della that he did indeed feel superior to Keel, but now, with the man in her presence, he was finding it difficult to make the statement again. He ground out his second cigarette, and noted that Keel hadn’t smoked one this trip around.
“I guess,” Keel said without moving, “that I should get back and tell Della that you’re all right.” Suddenly there seemed nothing to talk about.
“She shouldn’t have worried,” Hillary said. He noticed that he hadn’t smoked his second cigarette down as far as the first.
“She worries about most lost people,” Keel said, absently. “It’s from working with all those damned kids.”
“Eagle,” Hillary said, softly, “told me that you and Della were thinking about getting married.”
“Yeah,” Keel said, looking Hillary full in the face. “We’ve talked about it pretty often. Why?”
“Nothing. I think she’s nice. Devoted.”
“You didn’t find her too sick, did you?” Keel asked with a smile.
“How do you mean?”
“Prof, you know damned well what I mean.”
“I thought it a couple of times. I don’t think it now.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Hillary reached for a third cigarette and changed his mind. Perhaps Keel was right. Maybe he did think she was sick.
“What brought you around, man?” Keel asked with a smile. Now he slowly pulled out a cigarette and flashed his eyes at Hillary above the lighted match.
“I don’t know. Maybe the walks to the Battery. Maybe getting to know you and Della, Eagle, and the rest. All these or perhaps nothing. I don’t know what brought me around. Maybe I feel here a strength I’ve never known. I don’t know.”
“Stop saying you don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Who in the hell does?”
As had become habit with them, they fell into another silence until Keel, heaving up to change positions in his chair said, “Sometimes it all seems as foreign to me as it must to you. I have to leave sometime too. I have a feeling that it won’t be long now.”
Hillary looked up quickly. “Where’ll you go?”
Keel, without looking at him, said, “Oh, I’ll worry about it when the time comes.”
“You said soon.”
“Time’s relative in the final sense, you know. Once you consign yourself to being an infinitesimal speck in the universe, which you are, you don’t worry too much about it.” He sat erect suddenly and said: “Damn! I wish I could believe that.”
“It’s nice that you can be human.” Hillary looked at Keel. “I remember the first time we met, that night with Eagle. You hated my guts.”
“Know why?”
“No.”
“Everybody uses Eagle. Everybody. And for my money, that night you were just another one of those shysters out destroying Eagle, who is—believe it or not—so much a part of us. We dig the NAACP, even when we laugh at it. But it’s impersonal. Some people preserve statues and old drawings on cave walls, but we have to have Eagle. He’s us. He’s fire and brain; he’s stubborn and shabby; proud and without pride; kind and evil. His music is our record: blues, why goddamnmit, his best music always came from blues. Isn’t that terribly like all of us? Building on the blues,
building with such speed and intricacy that we don’t even know it’s blues right on? We don’t understand it, but we have short patience with cats who try to imitate him. Eagle is our aggressiveness, our sickness, our self-hate, but also our will to live in spite of everything. He symbolizes the rebel in us. No organization can do that.
“That night I thought you’d taken another chunk out of his hide and I did hate you. The cat’s going sometime soon. You look in his eyes and you can see it; every morning you see it a little nearer.…”
“I think I’ve seen this.”
“I believe you have.”
So again they sat in silence, each of them with his thoughts on Eagle and some incident they had shared with him. Hillary could not visualize Eagle at that moment, but Keel could see him on the bus, almost anywhere in the land, alone in that dust-covered vehicle while the rest of the band, craftsmen surely, but geniuses not, sat in an air-conditioned diner and had a leisurely dinner. When they were through, filing out dutifully and apologetically, they would bring Eagle a sandwich or two, or the dinner, slopped together and dripping on a paper plate. Still they would expect him to inspire them—to swing the whole damned band at the next town.
And he would.
“Feel okay?” Keel asked.
Hillary nodded.
“Why don’t you go back and give Della a hand? I’ll be along in a minute. The joint ought to be filling up by now.”
Hillary rose without a word, paused at the door, turning to look back at Keel, then passed out, wordless.
Keel sat and looked down upon the darkened street. He wondered what it would be like to live and move about in daylight, as he once had done: to get up in the morning when everyone else did and go about his tasks, whatever they might be at that time, returning home with the sun still up. Yet everything happened at night: most people died and most babies were born then, a nurse had once told him.
Eagle, now, he seldom blew in public during the day—at an occasional Sunday afternoon session, perhaps, or, more likely, at the Studio on 57th Street, or in someone’s home, if he could round up the musicians he wanted to play with at, say, nine or ten in the morning, after they had been gigging all night in some pissy-smelling club. You had to like your music to do what Eagle and the rest did, or you had to like where it took you, or what it did for you.
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