“Me and him are going for a ride in the country. You wanna come?”
“No. You two go ahead. What time will you be back?”
“Oh, I don t know. Six, maybe.”
“Before supper?”
“Why, yes. I suppose we can be back before then.”
“All right, ” she says, going over to kiss him. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
I walked in with the knife in my hand and the room was even darker than before. It was even sweeter smelling too. I wondered if the sweetness came from the picture of her on the bedside table which he sprayed with cologne and kissed each night before he went to bed, drunk. I saw him do it once when he was lit and it was almost as embarrassing as the time I found her halfnaked.
“What’re you—”
“Quiet! Shut that door! You want the neighbors to see?”
Her body is pale and full and she does not rush to dress. She walks past me slowly and I can smell her, the way she smells. My face is a rush of blood as I watch her walk to the long mirror with the man’s shirt and the worn money held up in front of her. From behind her, 1 can see her, from below her, I can see her, in the mirror, that sweet woman-smell and what I never knew nor saw. She brushes past me again slowly, flushing in the long mirror.
“Mama—”
“Hush! I’ll get decent soon. I just can’t seem to find my silk slip nowheres. ”
Turning, her hips, her bottom, facing me now, turning away, legs bending, curving up, hard on what I was hardly meant to—
“Ha ha ha!” A hungry crow, laughing. “Look at you! Stop your gawking there. Ain’t you never seed a naked woman before?”
“No, Mama, no”—swallowing, breathless—“I haven’t ever seen a—”
“Shhh!”
She rushes to me and holds the man s shirt over my mouth. Her body is beside my body, and I can feel the warmness of her nearness. Her chest rises and falls. Outside, slowly, a car drives by. I can hear it stop, reverse, and idle before our driveway. “Listen,” Mama whispers. “I’m gonna go see who that is and I want you to stand still. You’ve seen enough of me this morning without having to gawk no more.” But when she leaves I turn around and watch her in the sunlight of the kitchen window, her skin the type a hand would move to, her body barely trembling. She is waving at the person in the car. His motor is not our daddy’s. She is waving to the person in the automobile. She is waving him away.
I turned my head from her picture to the shape of my daddy on the rollaway bed. He was dressed like a king in his lavender bathrobe, his royal belly puffed high like a rotting pumpkin. I took the fishing knife and laid it across him. It wouldn’t be very difficult. He was so gone he wouldn’t feel anything anyway. All I’d have to do would be to point the blade down and throw the weight of my body on top of it. Then he wouldn’t have to face it no more.
With one hand, I tightened my grip on the knife. With the other, I felt the place where he’d hit me just hours before. I wondered why he struck me. He said it was because I wasn’t his goddamn son, but we both knew it was something more than that. I’d tried to save his life and he’d hit me. He was this close to choking on his own vomit and puke and I had helped him and he’d hit me. He looked at me once and what I had done and the man said I had saved him and he’d hauled off and hit me. I thought about it and thought about it, but couldn’t get much of anywhere. Maybe he had wanted to save himself. Maybe he had wanted one of his friends to help him. Maybe he was ashamed that his own son had saved him. Maybe he had not wanted to be saved at all.
I took the knife and stood over my daddy. Outside, the wind had turned to rain and the palm leaves sang like the souls of the dead. From across the yard came the noise of a piano, and from across the city the song of a siren. I pointed the blade downward and grabbed the handle tight. I was chattering and trembling, but I managed to steady myself. When I fell, and the wetness sprung up from under me, I thought to myself how easy it was, how it didn’t take much effort at all. You just grab on to the thing, hold it steady, and hurt it so bad it can’t go on no more. So I wasn’t even killing him. I was witnessing a death.
I finished and went to the bathroom and washed my hands, then I came back to the rollaway bed and sat beside him. It was more sweet-smelling now, and the rain had died, and the bed was covered with my daddy’s wetness.
“It don’t take much work to make something dead.”
That was what I told him as I sat right there beside him.
“It don’t take much work at all.”
I remembered how I still had the knife in my hand, and how warm it felt, and how I wasn’t even crying. There really wasn’t any reason to cry, at least not then, at least not yet.
“Not much work at all.”
Once, a long time past, my daddy took me for a ride in the country. We listened to rock ’n’ roll on the radio and stopped to buy strawberries from a roadside vendor. My daddy didn’t have any medicine the whole time I was with him, and when we weren’t listening to the songs on the radio, he would talk to me. It wasn’t much, really. Just talk. But it was something, all right. It was goddamn everything.
I am not his he is not my she is am is I—
Because I am not his killed him, because I had only witnessed a death, I rose from the bed to stare at the face which wasn’t even there, at the shotgun which lay across his shoulder, at the fantail of blood and smoke on the far bedroom wall.
________________________________
It was a bad hurt.
I stood before the full-length mirror in the bathroom at Number One’s house. Everybody was asleep. It was barely past two o’clock and I could hear them snoring. I busied myself inspecting the places where he’d hit me. There were two patches on my sides, and a rising purple splotch on my stomach. My lower lip was torn a little and dribbled blood, but it wasn’t as bad as it felt. I knew there weren’t any broken ribs or anything.
After a while I turned my face from its reflection and shut out the light in the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet seat. I must have been crying louder than I thought because I heard footsteps coming down the corridor. Number One knocked at the door, briefly.
“I’m all right,” I told him. “Go back to bed.”
“Nuh-uh,” he answered, whispering. “You open this duh-door right now or I’ll wuh-wake my muh-muh-mama.”
I waited awhile before I answered him, staring into my hands.
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“No,” Number One answered. “I wuh-wouldn’t. Yuh-usually. But in your cuh-case I’ll muh-make an exception.”
I sat in the darkness for some time wondering whether I should call his bluff, but before I had a chance to open the door myself, which I would have done, eventually, I found that he’d picked the lock with one of his mother’s emery boards. He stood in the shadows like a slumped-over ghost and ran his hand over his whole face. He pooted and said, “What in Guh-guh-God’s name has guh-guh-gotten into you, little puh-puh-pecker? What’re you doing luh-locking yourself in other folk’s tuh-toilets thuh-this hour of the nuh-nuh-night?”
I didn’t say a word. He stepped into the bathroom, locked the door behind him, and turned on the overhead. When he saw the shape I was in, he just said, “Suh-suh-ummm-bitch,” over and over. After he’d finished admiring my battle scars, he left the bathroom and went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of alcohol and a washcloth. “Luh-lemme see your luh-luh-lip,” Number One told me.
“You can see it,” I said to him.
He scratched his neck and grinned.
“All right,” he said. He handed me the alcohol and the washcloth. “Clean yoursuh-suh-self up, then. I ain’t guh-gonna muh-mother you.”
I took care of my cuts and bruises and handed him the alcohol. He took the washcloth and ran it under the sink and gave it back to me. I placed it over my eye; a real shiner was welling up.
Number One said, “Your buh-brother treats you buh-bad. You nuh-know that?”
He sat in his long underwear on the lip of the bathtub staring at the blisters and mosquito bites on his feet.
“If yuh-you were my buh-brother,” he went on, “I wouldn’t tuh-treat you like that.”
I took the washcloth off my eye, squeezed it dry into the sink.
“I’d tuh-take care of you, and guh-give you things, and tuh-teach you to fuh-fight so guh-guh-goddamn good I’d be afraid to lay a hand on you. Listen.” He looked at me, lifted his eyes from his awful feet and looked at me. “You ain’t like your buh-brother. You’re sharp, and you got suh-suh-suh-sense. How cuh-cuh-cuh… how cuh-cuh-can you let him tuh-tuh-treat you like he duh-does?”
I looked at him.
“I ain’t got no choice.”
He tried to keep his voice down.
“You shuh-shore as hell do!”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Guh-Goddamn it!”
“I ain’t got no choices. Not about him nor nothing.”
“You little puh-puh-pecker!”
We must have been being too loud; from the direction of Number One’s parents’ room there came a yell. It wasn’t “Shut up!” or “Go to bed!” or anything, really, just a yell. Number One took his hard eyes off me and shoved me out of the bathroom and shut out the light and took me to the kitchen, where we could talk. He tried to make me sit down at the supper table—to talk some “suh-suh-sense” into my head—but I wouldn’t hear none of it.
“You suh-suh-suh-sit down now. You luh-listen to me.”
“I can’t. I got to go.”
“Go? Guh-Goddamn it! Where tuh-to? You ain’t guh-got nowhere to guh-go tuh-to!”
“I do too.”
I started to leave, but he grabbed my arm.
“Let me go, now.”
“You ain’t got no suh-sense.”
I turned on him.
“You just said I had!” I told him. “You said I was sharp! You said I was sharp and had sense not two seconds ago!”
“Wuh-well,” he stammered, shrugging his shoulders. “You shuh-shore ain’t got no sense nuh-now!” After he let go of my arm, we stood there, quiet. He asked me if I needed any money.
“No.”
“You shuh-shore?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right,” he said. “But you might nuh-need it.”
“I might. And I might not.”
“Buh-bright buh-boy,” he told me. “Ain’t got nuh-no choices, buh-but you nuh-know all thuh-the options.”
I looked at the cypress stump clock on the wall. It was a quarter past two and I had gotten only a half hour of sleep, but I had to get going.
“Goodnight, Number One. Tell your folks thanks for letting us sleep here tonight.”
“Buh-but you duh-didn’t sleep.”
“I slept some.”
“Not enuh-nuh-nough. Little puh-pecker. You’re guh-gonna kuh-kill yourself, the wuh-way you luh-live. You and your buh-brother buh-both.”
“Goodnight, Number One. Don’t you worry about us.”
“Your lips buh-bleeding.”
“I know it.”
As I walked to the door I heard him behind me, grumbling and shuffling his big sore feet. When I got past his driveway Number One shouted something at me I couldn’t make out, so I told myself that it mustn’t have been very important. I was sort of woozy, what with the thrashing I’d taken and everything, but I didn’t have a hard time finding my way out of the air force base. You just took this road till it came to that road, and that road till it came to another, then you walked up to the guard, who saluted you, and there you were, back in the real world.
When I’d gotten there—to the real world, that is—I noticed how little things had changed. The Fort Seltrum Road was as broken as before, the ditches to the right and left stank with the same sewage and stillwater, and the sky above seemed just as full, loaded as ever for another mean rain.
On the way to my mother’s house I fell into a bad habit I’d broken myself of long ago. When I walked, I didn’t look at anything else except my feet. I kept my eyes pointed down all the time on the toes of my tennis shoes, and I didn’t once look at the ditches, or the sky, or the road beneath me. My body felt so light I might not have had any feet at all, but I was moving toward my mother’s house, as if something else were moving me.
______________
After a while I fell out of my bad habit—I couldn’t keep my eyes pinned to my feet if you paid me. They kept straying up, and drifting to the right or left, and if I did find the tolerance to keep them aimed low for more than a minute, my head would flood up black and dizzy, and my breathing would come so short I’d have to stop to catch my wind. I figured it was useless trying to keep them down if they had other intentions, so I let them roam freely, even though there wasn’t that much around for them to see.
I headed north at the end of Fort Seltrum and came to a vacant lot before Limbeaux Street. Three kids about my age lay huddled on a mattress in the middle of the lot, sleeping despite the coming rain and general wetness. There were a couple of open cans of beans beside the mattress, and I picked one up to see if there were any beans left. I managed to finish off what little remained without waking any of the kids up, and I hurried off through the lot wondering what they were going to do when the harder rains of the morning came.
Limbeaux led directly to the parking lot of a shopping plaza where most of the stores had gone out of business. The only places still open were a movie theater and a pawn shop, a jewelry store and an automobile insurance agency. I kept to the walkway beneath the awnings of the separate stores, and when I came to the jewelry store I stared through the lit window.
In the back of the store a fat guard sat sleeping on a folding chair. There was a gun in his holster and a radio around his neck, and his hands hung twitching at his sides. Before him stood the display cases, rows upon rows of diamond jewelry. There were watches and necklaces and earrings and wedding rings, pendants and bracelets and glittering charms. A stone the size of a strawberry sat before me on a velvet cushion, and I pressed my head against the glass of the display case that protected it.
As soon as I had crossed the parking lot of the shopping plaza, I found myself standing before a ditch overflooded with stillwater. I could either walk an extra halfmile until the ditch ended or take off my shoes and wade across. I knew if I took the shortcut I might get hookworm, like my brother’d warned, but I couldn’t tell whether I had the strength to walk another halfmile. Finally I decided that I’d try to find myself a plank of lumber, so I could stretch it across the ditch and use it as a walking bridge, but when I went to the backalley of the old shopping center I found nothing but broken glass and trash and wornout tires. As I walked back to the ditch my mind was made up for me when it began to rain overhead. It wasn’t hard at first, but then, without warning, it started to squall.
I threw off my shirt and took off my shoes and held them both in my hands, then I waded into the ditch and felt its warmness run up to my chest. Beneath me the mud and sewage drew me down deeper with every footstep, and around me paper cups and old clothes floated in the rain-dimpled water. Halfway across I lost my footing, and the world became a wet brown bilgewater roar, but somehow I’d managed to keep my shirt and shoes dry. I emerged on the other side and rolled around in the grass to dry myself a bit, then I put my clothes back on. I could’ve stayed in the ditch and followed it all the way till I got there, but I found myself in a dirtalley that also led to my mother’s house and his.
The dirtalley was bordered by a scrawny wire fence and I took in the sights of the houses around me as I ran shivering through the rain. Before one house I saw a police car, the officer and some old man laughing out loud in the street. In the backyard of another house a dog stood tearing at a leather leash gathered in its jaws. Its mouth worked broken and it whined like a child and blood flowed in streams from beneath its nose. At one squat house a lady sat swinging on a porchswing anchored by a backyard jungle gym. An unlit cigar
ette hung from her mouth and her gingham dress was soaked through from the hard pouring rain. When I saw her I slowed down and waved at her and she stubbed out her cigarette—which wasn’t even lit— gathered the hemline of her dress in her hands, waved back at me, and walked quickly into her house. The rain had died some so I stood at the wirefence and watched the lady walk back inside. She had long brown hair that fell below her bottom and her arms were as thin as chinaberry twigs. As soon as she’d gotten into her house a face appeared in her bedroom window. It was a man, with a big bush of hair and a full beard and dark brown eyes set in two sunken circles, and he was scanning the backyard for signs of the lady. He looked like he was crazy for her, and when he couldn’t find any trace of her his heavy eyes fell full and terrified. He buried his face in his hands, and the curtains of the bedroom closed like wings over him, and I saw the woman’s hand run slowly and suddenly through the patch of his hair. I knew then it would be all right for him, and I stood there watching the man and woman hold each other until the curtains had emptied themselves of their bodies.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 10
