Sonny just drove around for a while, the way you do when you’re killing time, turning here and there with no particular purpose, gliding along and letting the people who were going some particular place zip past. Just driving could calm you down sometimes. The wheel gave you something to hold on to, your mind could switch off everything but signals and traffic and your body sort of went on automatic, working the clutch and shifting gears, pressing the brake and nudging the accelerator just right. Sonny was glad of cars. Not just because they got you someplace, but more because they gave you something to do. Even as a little kid who wasn’t old enough to drive yet, cars had helped Sonny that way, filling time, like when him and Dicky Bishop or Bobby Sturdivant would sit on the front steps of somebody’s house on the block on those long early evenings of summer after supper when the sky was gray pearl and got dark so slow you barely even noticed it happening. The way you played “Cars” was to have each person guess what kind of car would be the next one to pass—Ford or Chevy or Buick, or maybe a long shot like Studebaker. For each right guess you got a point, and the kid who had the most points after it got too dark to see what kind of car it was for sure won the game. Actually there wasn’t much traffic on the block and you could win by scores of 3–1 or 2–0. There were enough cars that passed to make it possible to play if you sat for a couple hours, but few enough so that it was kind of exciting when one came by. When you guessed a lot of them right, it made you feel kind of spooky, like you had the power to see into the future.
Sonny drove around for almost an hour but it still was only twenty after eight, so he fell by the Topper to have a couple drinks. The place was just warming up for a big Saturday night, the smoke and the voices getting thick, and the colored guys of the Rhythm-Airs combo breaking out their instruments and plugging in the electric organ. Sonny took a seat at the bar and ordered a seven-and-seven. He had just started to take the first sip when some joker slapped him on the back so hard he jiggled the glass and spilled a little bit, hearing at the same time the unmistakable, maniacal laugh of Uncle Buck.
“Kilroy is here!” Buck said in greeting, and Sonny turned around and shook hands with him.
“How about stepping over to a dark little booth and joining me and a charming little lady for a drink?”
Sonny didn’t really feel like hearing Buck’s latest stories, it wouldn’t help the confident, positive mood he was trying to build, but he couldn’t see any way out of it.
Buck’s girl for the evening was a bright-dyed redhead with a tremendous set of knockers that you got a pretty good view of through the wide cleavage of her tight, V-necked purple-cotton blouse. Buck just introduced her as “Gerry.” His girls never seemed to have last names. They were always named something like Gerry or Flo or Stell, and they always looked wild and hard, like they’d had a lot of experience and were out to get some more.
“Hey, where’d ya get that fancy shirt, cowboy?” Buck asked, reaching across the table and fingering the satiny material.
Sonny could feel himself blushing, fearing maybe the shirt looked silly after all.
“I donno,” he said. “Somewhere or other.”
“Must of got it off one of the rodeo riders at the State Fair,” Buck said with a laugh. “Hey, where ya headed all spruced up like that? Got a heavy date?”
“Not exactly,” Sonny said.
He was terrified that he might let something slip about the party and Buck would insist on going along. God, Sonny could picture it. Buck would find out it was an arty crowd and start telling stories about his days in Paris studying with Rembrandt, and if anyone pointed out Rembrandt was dead, Buck would get pissed off and claim it was Rembrandt’s grandson or something.
“Gotta meet someone in a while,” Sonny said.
“Aha! A clandestine rendezvous!”
Gerry looked at Buck like he was a little wacky, or maybe was speaking a foreign language.
Buck nudged her, gave her a big lecherous wink, and said, “My esteemed nephew here is one of the silent types—but don’t be fooled. Confucius say, ‘He who talk little, get much!’”
Buck roared and slapped the table. Sonny bolted a slug of his drink, feeling his ears go red.
“I think he’s kinda cute,” Gerry said, looking at Sonny in a way that made him press his legs together.
“See there, I told ya! The silent ones get ’em every time!”
“Shee-it,” Sonny said, finishing off his drink.
“Hey, let me fill that glass for you, friend and neighbor.”
Before Sonny could say anything, Buck had called the waitress and grandly ordered another round. When Buck bought you a drink, he made it seem like Diamond Jim Brady had just ordered champagne for the house.
“And how’s your good mother, my God-fearing sister?” Buck asked.
“O.K., I guess.”
“You may tell her,” Buck said with a flourish, “that her ne’er-do-well little brother has just secured himself an enviable position as sales manager of an up-and-coming new corporation. A group of young go-getters have recently purchased a franchise for a new type of Infra-Ray sandwich-heater that will revolutionize the concept of the hot lunch. You don’t need an oven, don’t need a grille, just set ’em up on the counter of a drugstore, what have you. And yours truly will head up the management of sales for the entire Midwest.”
Sonny translated that to mean that Buck would be selling sandwich-warmers on the East Side of Indianapolis.
“Seriously,” Buck said, switching from his fun tone to his serious, radio-announcer voice, “there’s a mint in this thing. It’s there for the taking.”
“Great,” Sonny said.
Buck laughed and put his arm around Gerry, telling her in his fun voice, “Stick with me, baby, and you’ll be fartin’ through silk!”
“Mr. Big Bucks, huh?” Gerry said suspiciously, but she didn’t move away when Buck’s hand slid down and gave her a friendly little pinch on the right boob.
Sonny slugged down the drink as quick as he could and said he really had to take off. He was sweaty and nervous, and wanted to be alone, wanted to try and collect himself before the party. It was almost nine.
Buck shook hands and gave him a knowing leer for good luck, and Sonny said good-bye and headed for the door. Just when he got about halfway there, in the middle of the goddam bar, he turned back around as Buck yelled, “Hey, Sonny”—everyone looked up from their drinks and talk—“remember my motto, ‘Work like a Trojan, especially at night!’”
Sonny tried to grin, hearing snickers and giggles all around him, and ducked for the door, frying inside.
The party was at a guy’s named Oliver Shawl, who lived on Talbott Street around 21st. Although the advancing They had already crossed 21st Street on their long march north, They had left some pockets of whites still hanging on, as in this area. The whites who still lived there either couldn’t afford to move or didn’t care about Them coming in and lowering all the property values. That was the reason many whites retreated from the black wave, not because of prejudice but because of property values. It was strictly a practical matter, and it saddened many of the liberal whites who wanted to live next to coloreds but couldn’t afford to because of property values going down, but did have enough money to afford moving to a nice new neighborhood farther north. So the whites who were left were either the ones who were so poor they couldn’t even afford not to be able to move because they couldn’t afford to stay in a mixed neighborhood, or the impractical dreamers like artists and oddballs who didn’t even care about property values.
The block that Shawl lived on was still not all one color or the other. The colored were there, though, you could see it because they sat around on their porches, the way the colored do. It was the way they had of sitting around on their porches that seemed to annoy many white people, as if they did it in some colored sort of way that made whites cluck their tongues and say, “Look at them, sitting around on their porches,” like there was something wrong about t
he way they did it.
Right next to Shawl’s place there was a porch full of colored people, kids and grown men and old ladies, all mixed up together, sitting around talking and being colored. Sonny didn’t look straight at them, but he tried to smile, sort of at an angle, hoping to show them he was friendly and supported the Supreme Court Decision, so they would be less likely to slit his throat with a gleaming razor. He had grown up hearing how niggers would just as soon slit your throat with a razor as look at you, and though he had learned in college there were many educated colored who didn’t do that stuff, the razor thing always came to his mind when he saw one.
Shawl lived on the ground floor of a rickety old duplex badly in need of paint, and rented the upstairs out to students. As soon as Sonny walked in, he knew he had worn the wrong thing because nobody else had on a coat or jacket, everyone was much less formal than that.
Sonny hung around inside the door, afraid to plunge on in, but luckily Gunner spotted him and came right over. Gunner, of course, was dressed just right for the occasion, wearing his go-ahead sandals, a rumpled khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of faded blue jeans that even had some splotches of paint on them. Already. You’d have thought old Gunner was born with an easel in his mitt.
Gunner looked Sonny over real quickly, probably wondering what the hell he was doing in a goddam cowboy shirt, but he didn’t mention anything about it. He led Sonny to the kitchen, which was pretty moldy-looking. There was an old table with no cloth on it, and some gallons of wine, a few stacks of paper cups, and a giant box of Cheez-Its. There was a big old washtub on the floor with ice and beer in it, but Sonny said he’d like some wine. He figured that was more of an artistic kind of drink than beer. Gunner poured him a Dixie cup full of what looked like some dago red.
They went out to what must be the living room, though it didn’t have any furniture except for a couple Salvation Army chairs and a kind of mattress on the floor with a bedspread over it that people were sitting on. Gunner told Sonny he wanted him to meet the host, and Sonny glanced around the room, looking for some tall, gaunt guy with haunted, artistic eyes. Gunner couldn’t seem to spot him either, although there were only ten or so people in the room, but then there was a new, strange sound, a mechanical kind of whirring noise, and a guy buzzed into the room riding a motorized wheelchair. He was a neat, serious-looking guy who had evidently had one of those diseases that leaves your arms and legs as thin as curtain rods and pretty near useless. When Gunner introduced Sonny, Shawl just nodded and gave him the once-over with an expression Sonny hoped was a smile but looked much closer to a sneer.
“Join the festivities,” he said, then whirred away, back toward the kitchen.
“Shawl is pretty cynical,” Gunner said.
“I can understand.”
Marty was there in a pair of her skin-hugging toreadors and a low-cut blouse knotted at the waist. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her shoes off, wiggling one foot in time to the music. It was a record of a guy singing and playing the guitar, but it wasn’t hillbilly music exactly. It sounded to Sonny more like old English folk songs but it was about America. Something about This land is your land, and it’s my land.… The words seemed a little communistic.
Marty smiled and nodded at Sonny but didn’t interrupt her foot-wiggling concentration on the music. Sonny tried bobbing his head a little to the rhythm and looked around the room. There were four or five guys, most of them older-looking, and only two other girls besides Marty. One of them wasn’t really a girl but an older woman around thirty-five or so. She sat on a chair in a corner all by herself, sipping a Dixie cup of wine and staring at nothing special. She was the only person sitting in a chair, unless you counted Shawl in his mobilized wheelchair. The only other female was a fairly young, arty-looking girl wearing sandals and Levi’s and a man’s white shirt. Her hair was long but more stringy than sleek, and to put it most generously the girl was rather hefty. The ravishing girl that Sonny had counted on seeing across the crowded room wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He should have brought Buddie after all.
It didn’t take long to finish the wine in the Dixie cup, and Sonny went to the kitchen for a refill. He got talking to a tall, skinny guy with glasses named Donald Hoskins, who was a real painter, although he taught art to support himself. Unless you were great like Picasso or somebody, that’s what you had to do to make a living, if you were an artist. Hoping he didn’t sound stupid, Sonny asked Hoskins how people got to see his paintings.
“You have a show,” he said.
“Where do you have it?”
“Well, anyplace you can. In an art gallery, mostly. I had one last year in New York. In an art gallery there.”
“Hey, that’s great. New York.”
Hoskins smiled rather painfully. “I guess it’s nice to have had it,” he said.
“Did you sell a lot of your paintings?”
“Two—or one, really. Maybe you could call it one and a half.”
Sonny wasn’t sure if the guy was pulling his leg. “Can you sell half a painting?” he asked.
“No, not actually. What happened was, one painting was bought by a cousin of my mother who lives in New Jersey. Another one wasn’t exactly bought by anyone, but it was damaged when the paintings were shipped back and I collected insurance on it.”
“Oh.”
“I did get paid for it, anyway.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Hoskins shrugged. He didn’t look bitter, just sad. Sonny couldn’t think of anything consoling to say, and he eased out of the kitchen, wandering back to the living room. There was a smaller room off of it that was full of books and magazines and papers. Sonny didn’t exactly mean to peek in on Shawl’s private stuff, but he couldn’t help noticing that some of the magazines were those little egghead weeklies that were printed on rough paper and didn’t have any pictures on the covers, just names of articles. Magazines that looked like that were usually pretty pinko, and Sonny wondered if maybe Shawl was actually a Commie. They said it was people who were bitter and down on everything who joined the Commies, and God knows Shawl had a right to feel that way. Maybe the whole place was a secret communist cell; with the magazines and the folk music and everything, that’s about all you’d need. It was hard to tell, though, and Sonny was kind of ashamed of himself for being suspicious. Jesus, there were even some friends of his mother who thought he was one, so he shouldn’t go around suspecting other people, not unless he really had the goods on them.… Even then you didn’t always know. McCarthy claimed to have the goods on all kinds of people, but other real proven Americans, even United States Senators, said he was full of baloney.
Sonny went back and sat down beside Gunner. There was a cool jazz record on now, one of the ones with a soft, moany trumpet, and Marty had her eyes closed, all absorbed in the music. Sonny asked Gunner in a whisper, “Is Shawl an artist himself?”
“No, he works on the Times. He edits stuff, on the copy desk.”
The Times was the only paper in town that supported Democrats sometimes, but that was probably because it was part of a national chain, and maybe because of that it wasn’t as widely read as the Star and the News. Some people didn’t quite trust the Times, maybe because it supported Democrats sometimes or maybe because it was owned by outsiders.
“Shawl likes artists, though,” Gunner explained. “They’re more in line with his own views about things.”
“His views?”
“Yeh, you know. Against the status quo and all.”
“Oh.”
Gunner said it casually, as if there was nothing to worry about. Sonny just hoped old lady Armbrewster never got a load of Shawl and his crowd. She’d have J. Edgar Hoover on them in nothing flat.
Besides Shawl himself there was another guy there who wasn’t really an artist but was pissed off at the status quo. His name was Eddie Messner and Sonny remembered him because he used to play ball for Shortley. When Sonny was a kid only eight or
nine years old, he started reading everything in the sports page and he knew the names of all the Shortley players, who seemed like remote gods to him, even the reserves. Messner hadn’t been a star but he fought his way into the starting lineup in his senior year. He was what the sports pages call a “watch-charm guard,” which meant that even though he was only a little bastard, the coach had stuck him in the line with the monsters who slogged around and battered the shit out of each other and were trampled all over by the backs and never got the glory. Sonny had also seen Messner officiating some of the football games at Shortley when Sonny was taking pictures for the Echo. Officials made a little money for working a game but mainly they were old jocks who liked to do it just to have an excuse to wear a uniform again. Messner didn’t like his real work very much, which was selling vacuum cleaners, but it gave him time to knock off when he wanted and officiate a ball game. Sonny remembered once before a ball game Messner was in the locker room talking to some of the guys about his crummy job, telling them they better get their glory and enjoy it now ’cause soon enough they’d be peddling some damn thing just like him. It really depressed Sonny, hearing an older guy talk like that to a bunch of young guys.
Sonny’s dislike for Messner got even worse because of the way he was acting at the party. He was flirting around with the fat girl art student, just like she was his own age or something. Sonny thought it was pretty crummy for old bastards in their thirties to horse around with young girls like that. Messner seemed pretty drunk, and Sonny wondered if he was Irish. He looked like he might be. He was small and wiry and had the kind of thin red hair that showed the freckles on the top of his head. He was sitting on the mattress thing on the floor in a corner of the room, practically trying to feel up the fat girl right in public. Sonny wished if the guy had to fool around he’d pick on the blond gal in the chair, who was more his own age. She looked real lonely and probably would have liked the attention, even from Messner.
Going All the Way Page 18
