The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “You like spaghetti?” he asked.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “I’m a pretty good cook,” he said. “Bet you didn’t know that.”

  We stood up and I slammed a hard right into his ribs. “Nothing about you ever surprises me,” I said genially.

  He clouted me a good one on the shoulder. “Don’t be so sure,” he said.

  Then he gave me his address and phone number and we said “See you Friday evening” to each other, and then I left.

  Chapter eighteen

  Passing through the anteroom, I gave Jack and Curly my nicest, most indulgent smile, pardoning the brutal error they had made. Both leered back at me with a couple of savage expressions suggesting they would like to do it all over again, but I suppose that is only what happens when policemen try to smile. I went on.

  “Nub?”

  Had one of them called? I paused, turned, looked first at Jack and then at Curly, but both were just as my eyes had left them a second before, grinning fiercely.

  “Nub?”

  Was it Dall, then? I turned further, but the door to his office was still closed, as I had left it.

  Completing my full, bewildered circle, I saw that the only other person in the room was the Negro sitting on the bench. I looked at him. He was looking up at me, and all thirty-two of his ivories were gleaming in sharp relief against the exceedingly dark hue of his skin.

  The tightly stretched lips snapped back into place, covered the teeth, formed a puckered vowel: “You Nub Stone?” Here was a face, dimly remembered from out of the past, without a name. Negro faces in general, and very dark ones in particular, are difficult for a white person to distinguish one from another. This face belonged to a person who, if he were dressed in silks and had a reins-ring in his hand, could pass for one of those waiting livery boys who lean forward on lawns in perpetual cast-iron, little as he was. My first thought of him was that I had liked him, had at one time enjoyed being with him so much because he was one of the few guys I had ever known in Little Rock who were smaller than I, and I will make no attempt to conceal this feeling, this fact that my spare stature had once been magnified by his sparrowness. But what was his name? The first time I had seen that face, that feral moon smudged more black than ash-buds in the front of March and smiling as broadly as it was now, was under a sprawling oak tree beside the caddyhouse of the Riverdale Country Club in the summer of my tenth year. Wanting a few dollars for a pair of boxing gloves, but having a penurious father who insisted that I earn my own money, I had gone to that golf course in hopes that it would be one place in the whole town where a ten-year-old might be employed. I was not overly disappointed when, arriving on my bicycle early one Saturday morning, I saw that all of the other caddies were darkies. Watching them for a while, I observed that their method of being hired was simply to sit under a large oak tree and wait until they were called. So I selected a neighboring, segregated oak and sat down beneath it, laying my bicycle on the ground. I waited a very long time. The other caddies cast a few curious glances at me from time to time, and, I imagined, made a few remarks. I might be sitting jobless under that oak tree yet, if it had not been for this same pitchy Negro, at that time a threadbare pickaninny who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old but was old enough to sense what had escaped all the others (even the white caddymaster, I later learned, had no idea what I was doing there), namely, that I wanted to caddy, for he said, poking his face close to mine and exposing all of those pearly grinders in the same grin I would see now, “You not just sittin here cause you likes the sunshine, is you?” I told him no, I wanted to caddy, and he asked me if I had ever toted bags before, and I told him no. “What you called?” he asked, and I told him Nub Stone. He extended his hand, and I clasped those long brown bony fingers, touching Negro flesh for the first time in my life, and he said, “Stick with me, white boy, you git took care of. Call me—” Call him what? What, dammit?…Something with an N…Nick? No. Nate? Nat? Oh…Nub? No, that’s me. Nup? Nep? Nap? Nap…Naps.

  “Naps!” I said and extended my hand.

  He shook it vigorously and said, grinning wider than ever, “Thought for a moment you wouldn’t remember it.”

  How could I forget it? He had taken me under his wing that day, introduced me to the caddymaster, a redneck bully who wondered why I wanted to work with them niggers but assured me there was no law against it, and Naps got me a couple of loops of the course as a Grade-C or neophyte caddy attached to a duffer playing a handicap game against a Scotchman for whom Naps caddied, so that we could remain close together and he could show me how to carry the bag and how to tell a mashie niblick from a putter, and how and where to stand when my man was driving or chipping or dinking, and how and when to pull the pin.

  “What they got you in for?” he asked solicitously.

  “Oh, I’m not in for anything,” I replied. “Just been visiting an old friend of mine, the sergeant.”

  “That Hawkins? He your friend?”

  Naps was well dressed, in a tasteful tropical suit, whose dark Prussian blue reflected the bluish accents of his complexion, and a yellow oxford shirt with striped tie. But that old day he had been wearing a pair of frequently patched blue jeans and a torn T-shirt and holesome tennis sneakers without socks; and after sunset, when the last golfer had gone, I offered him a ride home on my bike, and discovered to my great surprise and pleasure that he lived on the same street I did, Ringo, and had lived there, not two blocks away from me, all of his life, which was only ten months shorter than mine. And he rode behind me for the first mile home, and then he took over and I rode behind him for the second mile, and thus we reached our neighborhood and our houses in a spirit of teamwork and concert, a consort of equals which establishing our friendship on that day would preserve it for several years thereafter. So really he antedated Dall.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You got influence on him?”

  “A little,” I said and smiled, thinking of all the times I had bent Dall’s flexible nature to suit my ends.

  The one called Curly was standing beside us and said, “Nigger, who tole you you could get up from that bench?” Then to me, “He botherin you?”

  “Not at all. He’s an old friend,” I said.

  Curly blinked at this, and his upper lip curled slightly, but he did not comment on it. Instead he said to Naps, “Boy, you git on in there and have a little talk with the sergeant.” He put his hand on Naps’s shoulder and urged him forward toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s he accused of?”

  “A whole bunch of stuff,” Curly said evasively, “but mainly he was goin seventy miles an hour on Roosevelt Road.”

  “What’s the fine for that?” I asked.

  Curly looked irritably at me and said, “It’s forty bucks, but the sergeant would like to have a few words with this boy.”

  “Can you pay it?” I asked Naps.

  He was staring down at his shoes, a fine pair of shiny oxblood brogues. Slowly he shook his head.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, stepped around them, and walked to Dall’s door and opened it and went in.

  He was standing at the window, with his back to me, and I had to wait a little while until he turned around. His face, when he turned, would have made brave Achilles wet his pants, but it relaxed at the sight of me, and he said, “Oh, it’s you. Leave something?”

  “No,” I said. “Last time I was in here I was here for pleasure. Now I’m here for business.”

  “What in hell you talkin about, Nub?”

  “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Clifford W. Stone, lawyer for a client of mine who’s been arrested. I’m here to argue with Your Honor in an attempt to have him released.”

  He grinned. “Okay, smart guy, court’s in session.” He banged the gavel of his fist twice on his desk. “Who you defending?”

  “A gentleman name of Naps Howard.”

  His grin collapsed all of a heap, and he
leaned across his desk at me and said, “Look, Nub, why don’t you go eat supper or see if you caint take Margaret to another movie or somethin, huh?”

  “Naps is an old friend of mine,” I said. “An older one even than you.”

  “I wouldn’t admit it,” he said, severely reproachful.

  I took out my billfold and withdrew four tens and put them down on his desk. “Here’s his fine,” I said.

  He looked at my money with sickened contempt, and then he looked up at me and said in a quite cold and hard voice which I had never heard from him before, “Son, you are gonna get me honestly mad and I am gonna kick your ass out that door and then we aint never gonna be friends no more. You don’t know what you’re doin. You come round stickin your nose in other people’s business, you’re liable to get it knocked off. That nigger’s your old buddy, you say? How well d’you think you know him? Anybody ever told you that that Howard bastard is the most uppity, biggety, rambumptious coon in the whole state of Arkansas? Anybody ever come up to Boston and set you wise about that, huh? Why, that boy is so all-fired squirty and cocky and stuck-up it makes me plain sick to my guts. He’s been tryin to put one over on us for the last goddamn five or six years, and if you think I aim to let you let him, you got a couple more guesses comin to you, buddy boy. Anywhere there is ever nigger trouble in this town, I can bet my last nickel that that buck crow is right square in the middle of it. Any time there’s a demonstration, he’s always at the head of the parade. Any time there’s a sit-in, he’s always the first to plump his fat ass down on the stool. He gives us more trouble than all the rest of em put together, and he’s slept so many nights in the jail we ought to of charged him rent. But one of these days, by God, he’s gonna learn some respect, if I have to ram it up his butt with a crowbar! Now you pick up your fuckin money and get out of here!”

  “Dall,” I said pacifically, “I’ve known you from way back. I’ve also known Naps Howard from way back. Both of you are good old boys, and neither one of you is any better than the other. I’m sure he doesn’t hate you. Why should you hate him?”

  “Listen, buster—”

  “But I’m not going to argue race relations with you,” I went on, leaning across his desk to press my attack and remind him that he had never successfully intimidated me and I was of no mind that he begin now. “I’m simply going to tell you, as one old friend to another, and as one responsible citizen to another, that I know enough about law to know that unless you have a clear case against him, unless you can prove that he is guilty of anything other than a traffic violation, you had better take this money and let him go, or I’m going to get a lawyer and have him in here breathing down your neck for false arrest, and I’m not fooling.”

  Dall sat down. He leaned back in his swivel chair and placed his hand on the butt of his revolver, which was his last contact with authority. Draw it! my eyes dared him. But he smiled, and between his smiling teeth in a low voice he said, “You must really love that black boy. Is he gonna fix you up with some nigger pussy?”

  I stepped swiftly around the desk and grabbed his collar. “Get up!” I yelled. “Get up and fight like a man.”

  “No, Nub,” he said. “I aint skeered of you, but if you start mixin it up with me, Jack and Curly would be in here before you could say balls, and Jack has a mighty itchy trigger finger. You go on and get out of here. Take your damn money and your damn nigger and to hell with all three of you. But you’re gonna think there’s somethin awful fishy about a nigger who drives a goddamn limousine convertible but won’t even pay his own fine. Now get out.”

  He stood up, took the money off his desk and stuffed it into my hand, then ushered me to the door, where, before opening it, he looked me in the eye and said, “Never mind about coming over to my place for supper Friday.”

  Then he opened the door, shoved me through it, and said to Curly, “This gentleman has bought the nigra out of hock. Kindly escort both of them out of the building.”

  Then he slammed the door on me.

  Outside, conveyed to the front steps of police headquarters by Curly’s tight hands gripping our arms, we stood alone and looked at each other sheepishly in the late, low sunlight which streamed down Markham from the direction of the train station and was slowly beginning to change white to black. My wristwatch said fifteen after six. The traffic on Markham had all gone home to supper.

  “You oughtn’t’ve,” Naps said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Here,” he said, drawing out his wallet from his coat pocket, “let me pay you back.”

  I flapped my hand at him. “I didn’t really pay him. He wouldn’t take it,” I said, and Naps put his wallet back in his coat, but not before I had a glimpse of all the greenery. “But I thought you were broke?”

  “Naw,” he said, and split his face with that Cheshire grin again. “But the law not ever gon get a penny out of me.”

  I know how you feel,” I said. “I never pay traffic fines myself.”

  “Much obliged to you anyway. I spect that sergeant sure made it kind of hot for you. Heard lots of hollerin goan on in there. Well, Nub,” he asked, “can I give you a lift anywheres?”

  “Which way are you going?”

  “Just whichever way you want to go, my friend.”

  “Still live on Ringo?”

  “Yeah, but not the same place. I’m stayin down on the far end now.”

  Down where the shacks are, poor Naps. How like a Negro to spend all his money on fine clothes and a car, yet dwell in a shanty. Well, if he was heading that way, I supposed he could drop me off at my father’s. But Daddy and Sybil would have finished eating; he always had his supper at five-thirty on the dot. I was feeling morose and outcast and unwanted, and I didn’t much care to sit around and watch The Farmer’s Daughter and Ben Casey with my old man and his floozy. But what else was there to do, if Margaret was out on a date somewhere with James Royal Slater?

  We turned down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. Naps had grown considerably in fifteen years, but still, walking beside me, he was a good inch shorter. This is a great comfort to a small man.

  “Funny,” I mused. “The first time we met I gave you a ride home on my bike. Now you’re giving me a ride home in your car.”

  “Aint that sump’m?” he said. “You was in trouble that day. I was in trouble this day.”

  “Odd,” I said.

  “Yeah, Nub, you was what the caddies called a horror. I guess you know about that, it’s a outside boy who comes in and tries to caddy with the reg-lars. It’s kind of like a ice cream caddy, who caddies just for spendin money, only you was a horror, and that’s worse.”

  “I’m still a horror, Naps,” I said sadly.

  He cast me an impish sideward glance, and grinned. “Taint much difference between a hornet and a yellow jacket when they both get under folks’ clothes,” he said cryptically, and I grinned back at him.

  We arrived at the parking lot. His car was—Good Lord!—his car was a marvelous, soul-stirring Lincoln Continental convertible of the same shimmery Prussian blue as his suit and the patina of his skin, a mammoth hunk of sleek steel which, parked uncomfortably between two homely police cars, seemed a splendid queen in the company of drab yeomen. If the automobile is a sex symbol, that was one machine I would love to have slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes of Bothatonce, after a wild ride around the corner of Divinity.

  Naps, seeing my mouth agape and reading my thoughts, beamed proudly and said, “Aint she a fine-lookin job?” He patted her door fondly. “This wagon goin on a bore and stroke of 4.30 by 3.70, and she got a three-speed torque converter transmission.”

  “I don’t know much about bores and torques,” I said, “but I would consider it an honor to ride in this baby.” So fresh and clean was she, as though she had just emerged from the dealer’s showroom, that I half expected to see a fantastic price tag still stuck to her.

  “You get in the back,” he said, winked, and he
ld the rear door open (a convertible with four doors!).

  “Oh, come now,” I protested, “let’s not be hypocrites. I’ll ride up front with you.”

  “Naw, later maybe, after it’s dark. But if we gon enjoy us some fresh air with this here top down, we best sit separate. You know how it is.” He winked again and gently guided me into my throne, a supple, yielding couch of finest white leather. Then he closed the door, bowed, and walked around to the other side, getting into the front seat behind the wheel. From the glove compartment he took out a chauffeur’s cap and put it on his head.

  “Don’t I look good?” he asked, turning to show me. He looked splendid.

  “Naps, are you making fun of me, boy?” I asked threateningly.

  “Oh, nossuh!” he said, all mock-servility, turned, started the powerful engine and placed his hands lightly on the wheel. “Where to, Boss?”

  “Don’t call me boss,” I said, a trifle irritated, but a trifle pleased with this ridiculous scene we were making. In spite of myself I felt rich, regal, powerful, and even debonair, the troubles of my cumbrous day suddenly lightened. It went to my head. “Where would you like to go?” I asked.

  “You name it, man,” he said.

  “Well, Naps, I haven’t really seen this town for four years. Could we just drive around some?”

  “Right,” he said, shifted the stick into drive, and we floated away.

  That was a magnificent, unspeakably thrilling ride, coasting up and down the streets of my city in such luxurious splendor, first we went all the way down Broadway and crossed over Roosevelt Road to Main and back down Main Street. People stared.

  “Naps,” I called to him. “What did you say you do for a living? You run a gambling syndicate or something?”

  He laughed. “Naw, I’m a book salesman,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m the number one salesman for the Christian Souls Book House. Would you maybe be interested in a nice fine Bible?”

  I didn’t know whether he meant it or not. I’m not religious,” I said.

  “Well, ne’mind. How about a nice unexpurgated Fanny Hill?”