The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.

  “Mr. Slater,” she said.

  “He’s fifty years old and you call him Jimmy?”

  “He’s forty-eight years old, and he asked me to call him Jimmy.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you jealous?” she asked me out of the corner of her eyes.

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “I suppose you would be jealous of Doyle too.”

  I told her I saw no reason yet for that. She said that was good, because Dall (Doyle she persisted in calling him, with her un-Arkansan diction) was like a brother to her, a kind, helpful brother. She had never had a brother or a sister. She wished she had. (Her stepbrother and two stepsisters had all long since married and moved away, and she had never been close to them anyway.) But Dall was such an awful racist, she said, a real white-supremacist, and she couldn’t respect him for his views on that problem. She said she didn’t see him much lately, anyway, and he had never offered to take her to a movie or to dinner or anything, so she assumed his interest in her didn’t go beyond the compass of his police work. For a long while, she said, Dall had appeared faithfully at her house every day, to talk with her, and for a stretch of three or four weeks he became almost a pest, and her mother complained long and loud because she didn’t like for the neighbors to see a policeman sitting on the front porch for two or three hours every day. Still and all, she was very grateful to him. She would never forget how he had helped her understand herself.

  Now, as for the immediate future, we had to take care of a few plans. Where would we stay? We discussed the possibilities, and she told me about a very nice, modern motor hotel downtown on the east side, called the Coachman’s Inn, where businessmen often stayed whether they had cars or not. I preferred something old and quaint, but she said this place was new and quaint. It didn’t matter. Anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  She would have to rehearse the play out at Slater’s hacienda that afternoon (“I don’t want to,” she said, “but I have to”) and she would be free after five o’clock. Her bag was all packed now, waiting to go. (Confident girl!) We could go on over and check in at the Coachman’s Inn whenever I was ready to.

  “Any time,” I said, afire, nearly panting. “Just any time.”

  “I’ll have to sneak out,” she said. “Why don’t you go on around the corner and wait for me at the alley, and we’ll catch a cab from there.” She stood up, and so did I, although my knees were weak.

  The front door, a large Gothic affair with twin panels of frosted glass, swung inward without warning, almost too violently, and there was the hulking matriarch, her eyes sparkling wildly not at me but at her daughter. God help us! Had she been listening? Something about the way she glared fixedly at Margaret without glancing at me gave me hope that she had not, but all the same I felt a tremendous and bitter disappointment, a detumescent frustration, knowing already that our glorious tryst was shot to hell.

  “Margaret!” she wailed. “Margaret Margaret Margaret.” In this re-echoing drumfire was the clang of some sickness, some unutterable disgust and anguish and chagrin.

  “Y-y-yes, Mother?” quaked Margaret, dissolved in dread.

  “Margaret, whatever on earth have you done to your room? Good gracious sakes!”

  “Mother,” Margaret said, her panic suddenly eased by righteous indignation, “what have you been doing up in my room? You promised you would never, never go into my room.”

  “May God look down upon us in the infinite mercy of His heart! May this cup pass!” Mrs. Austin, her eyes rolled heavenward and her hands clutching her bosom, looked like one of those extravagantly pious Magdalenes in late baroque painting.

  “Mother, you snoop!” Margaret accused.

  “Margaret, you nasty demon!” her mother rejoined. “The devil has possessed you. You knew I would see it. You wanted me to see it. Oh, of all the most—”

  “Pardon—” I began, one hand timidly raised.

  But I was ignored. “I was afraid it would come to this,” Mrs. Austin went on. “Time and time again I told you you should talk with Dr. Ashley, but you wouldn’t listen. Now I’m going to take you, young lady. Right this minute.”

  With that, she gripped Margaret’s arm and almost pulled her off the porch, down the front steps, across the lawn, and into the car, an old Hudson parked in the driveway. I might have been ignored, forgotten completely except, just in that last moment before she was pushed into the front seat and the door was slammed on her, Margaret raised her eyes and looked at me through the wisteria vines, giving me a sheepish, apologetic, almost idiotically helpless look. Then she blew a kiss at me. And was gone.

  Chapter twenty-one

  I was still smiling, so help me. That was me all over. Like an outworn circus poster still clinging to a brick wall six months after the show has left town, a senseless grin was still stuck on my face. The fault of the recklessly optimistic Reader’s Digest, I suppose. Not even my loss, the bitter deprivation of a voluptuous and gratifying rendezvous in a motor hotel, nor my sudden Stone-ache, could quite squelch that unwitting master passion of benignity, toleration. Nothing, I had been advised by Reader’s Digest, is really worth worrying about, worth getting into a stew about. So I would not. Eventually Margaret would return and then we…But would she? Would she return, or would this Dr. Ashley impound her? I had a picture of a black Vandyke, thick lenses, sunlight struggling through Venetian slats into a darkened room, knouts and thumbscrews and Procrustean chaises longues. If the old lady didn’t like the way she decorated her room, why hadn’t she just politely asked her to change it? Or, better yet, live and let live; Margaret was a full-grown woman, after all, and she ought to be entitled to a little free will, at least in matters of personal taste. Whatever could she have done, I wondered, that would so affront her mother? Put up scenic wallpaper of Sybaritic orgies? Planted marijuana in the window boxes? Made a mobile out of whiskey bottles? The front door was still open; Mrs. Austin had not even paused to close it behind her. I might just run up and have a look. I glanced up and down the street; except for a kid riding his tricycle two doors down, it was empty. I tiptoed in. Closing the door, I addressed the house, “Is anybody home?” Nobody was. Automatically I wiped my feet on the coir doormat, the block letters AUSTIN obscurely visible in the tawny warp of its woof. Then I began to climb the long staircase. Near the top of the first flight I heard the quick patter of footsteps, and stopped, waited, listening, but it was only the quick patter of heartbeats, my own. The staircase ended in a wilderness of khaki corridors, alcoves and doors. “Try me,” one passage seemed to suggest, so I groped down it, past more doors, all of them shut, and came at last to a narrow terminal door, which I opened. Behind it was a steep slender stairway hurdling up behind, and parallel to, the wall. Light from the summit lit my way. When I got up there, pausing to catch my breath, I saw that this was sunlight and that it was infiltrating from all over: louvers in the gable tops, a fanlight, thin clerestory windows in the mansard cupola, and a galaxy of pinholes in the roof, planetariaed above me in the murky and musty clouds of crepuscule that hung like cobwebs from the rafters and corners, looming over the rough purlins and the bare lathwork, shrouding a jumble of dust-caked trunks, corrugated boxes, decadent metallic gimcracks and contrivances, a wasteyard of dispossessed belongings. There was a ragged smell of old cedar, wool, mildew, grease and the thin vegetal spoor of nocturnal insects and vermin. The attic is the subconscious, the id, of every house, somebody—Margaret?—once said to me. The attic receives into its snug and secret shadows the unwanted refuse of the rest of the house, and will keep it up here forever or until some of it, any of it, might possibly be needed or wanted again. No matter how lovely the rest of the house is, the attic will always somehow be frightening, haunted by all manner of dreadful things made even more awful by the darkness in which they are kept. To heal the derangement of this id is to convert it, with partitions and asphalt tile and lighting fixtures and curtains, into a sane and normal floor:
rumpus rooms or guest rooms or studios, and this had only been done in part to this particular house: I saw at one end of the attic how broad lengths of sheetrock had been erected within a framework of two-by-fours to form a room, one room, a large room made small by the way it was up here alone, fastened into a corner of this vast dim chamber like a nest precariously leeching the limb of a tree. It had a door, and the door was open, and I went in. The change, the contrast between this charming and personal room and the chaotic gloom outside, relieved me, gave me a sense of welcome which assuaged the guilt of my intrusion. Nice furniture, strikingly modern in contrast to the rest of the house, was tastefully arranged, artfully composed: a desk, a dresser, an easy chair, a studio couch, a coffee table. Everything had a pleasant turquoise color scheme, feminine without being effeminate; the only purely girlish objects in the room were a bevy of homemade rag dolls aligned in sitting positions on the couch…. But the walls—the walls, for crying out loud! Assaulting the chaste immaculate air of the furniture, the walls were cataclysmic explosions of riotous earthy strokes and slashes and smirches; a chimpanzee-painter could not have done these murals in his most rambunctious moment. I gasped aloud. Only a fraction of time would I remain standing in this state of shock, less than a minute before I would get out of there, but in the swift course of those few seconds I tried to take it all in—this overpowering maelstrom of ustulate shades, this umbered and ochered expression of some terrific, unconscionable anguish or panic or hatred. With palpitating, fibrillating heart I focused my eyes momentarily on individual parts of it, and perceived that the whole creation was a fuscous meshwork of letters and cursive swirls, a crisscrossing, overlapping, superimposing signboard of dozens of words, vengeful stigmata block-drawn in a thick vile impasto—a graphic, verbal defilement of the wall. “M is for the muttonhead you are, O is for the offal in your awful heart, T is for the tits you never let me nurse,” began a scurrile diatribe obviously addressed to Mrs. Austin, but the rest of it was mercifully obscured beneath a general overlay of lurid epithets. Elsewhere were dithyrambic ditties in which nearly antonymic words, most of them off-color, were forced to rhyme with each other; other less fescennine jingles; double-entendred behests (“Slater, put your money where your mouth is”); unkindly but fecund remarks (“Ethel Slater is a disabled lesbian”); and, strewn helter-skelter all over it all in the same tainted brown tints, vortical streaks suggesting the turmoil of a muddy river, one of which, as I gazed at it in heart-stopped horror, began to slip slitheringly down the wall. It didn’t matter. I had had enough. More shocked than sick, I turned to go and, in aiming at the door, dropped my eyes to the place where the artist had signed her work, signed it traditionally in the manner of the old masters, using Latin, albeit flawed Latin imperfectly modified, but still all too clear, adust, feeble but defiant: M. Austin fecit cum feces.

  Part two

  How to get down out of trees

  Many mountain damsels carry love charms consisting of some pinkish, soap-like material, the composition of which I have been unable to discover; the thing is usually enclosed in a carved cherry pit, and worn on a string round the neck.

  —Vance Randolph, The Ozarks

  Chapter twenty-two

  I got stinking drunk. Shambling southward block after block, lost, I finally came upon a liquor store at Fifteenth and High, went in, asked for a pint of bourbon, was asked what kind, replied anything, was requested to furnish proof of age, produced a stale draft card, was sold something in a paper bag, took it half a block down the street, eased the paper down below the neck, wrapped it around there, removed the cap, tilted it up and, ah, took a long swallow. In broad daylight, on the street. Fully aware that this was a weak, craven, despairing surrender, I convinced myself that it was completely in character and therefore not only pardonable but also reasonable, under the circumstances. Like a mordant cathartic the raw whiskey scoured through me, like Lysol, like Drano, it routed and rinsed my stricken soul. Venia necessitati datur, I had told Sam Houston in that dream: Indulgence is granted to necessity, we can get tanked up so long as we got a good reason. And he had said: I sure as hell have got a good reason. And now so have I. Pausing every block or so for another liberal gulp, I flounced homeward. Sybil would help me, she would drown my megrims in the deep soft oblivion of her spontaneous yielding; my heavy heart would achieve amnesty through the heart-pounding sweat of a lusty romp.

  But she wasn’t there. This day of all days she probably chose to go shopping. I checked each room, but the house was indeed deserted. Just me and my bottle, my little old bottle. I flopped down, all asprawl, in an easy chair, pressing the flat bottle to my chest, peering down into its neck alternately with one eye and the other. Half empty. Maybe I could pass out.

  So I finished the bottle, but I couldn’t. I lay face downward on the living-room rug and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t go, I couldn’t make it. A noncompos nincompoop, I lay there for ten minutes and then I had to get up, rising like a bloated and ponderous submarine, to go to the bathroom. Afterward I made another attempt to phone the Missouri Pacific baggage agent. Please, I said to him, please get me my suitcase so’s I can go home. I can’t go home if you won’t get me my suitcase. I have to have it. I’ve been walking around for four days now in the same suit, the same tie, the same goddamn smelly old shirt. Please. And he said: Buddy, I’m doin the best I can, keep your shirt on.

  Tottering around the house, in and out of rooms, of closets and cabinets, I looked high and low for the secret cache of Daddy’s liquor. I knew he had some, I knew he had a lot of it, but I couldn’t find any. After I had already reeled out of the house and was heading southward again down Ringo, I remembered that I had forgotten to check the bottom of the dirty-clothes hamper, where often there had been a bottle or two in the past, but by then my lurching gait was so swift that I couldn’t turn around and go back. Naps would have some anyway, a jar of rotgut at least, a little homemade stump with some sissing kick in it, and me and him could go off on a hell-bender. My only friend.

  The sun was hot, oh Lord the sun was hot, and the heavy white oppressive waves of it boiled my skull and thickened my fuddle. At Roosevelt Road, I had to wait a long time for an opening in the traffic before darting across, and then I tripped on the curb at the other side and sprawled, fell hard to the sidewalk, skinning my hands, one cheek, and tearing a rip in the knee of my trousers. An old woman, trailing an empty grocery cart, paused to help me up, but smelled me and went on. I pushed and arched and hauled myself up and pitched onward, into the last white residential part of Ringo, blessedly deserted unless scared housewives peeked through jalousied windows to watch the staggering progress of this bruised seersuckered lush as he headed inexorably toward Darktown.

  Leaving the rows of nice white houses, I set stodgy foot in that final segment of Ringo which is increasingly poor and colored. The street thins and becomes dirt, it elbows sharply to the right at West Twenty-ninth to avoid an open sewer, then straightens out again and, still dirt, for another half-dozen blocks moves on between brown tumbledowns with chicken coops and even a hogsty behind some of them; houses, some of them without electricity, many without plumbing, where janitors and laundresses embrace on iron beds in small rooms and produce caddies.

  “Where you goan, white man?” somebody asked of me, and I turned to see a gathering of truant gnomes playing mumble-de-peg in the scarred earth of a front yard, their game interrupted by my unique coming. One of them had straightened up, still on his knees, and was addressing me.

  “M’lookin fnapshod’s house,” I said. “Zee liveround here?”

  “Who?”

  “Naps Hod,” I said, as clearly as I could manage, then I added, “Misser N. Lon Hod.”

  “Sho he do,” another one said. “But what you want with him fo?”

  “Za goofren amine,” I explained.

  They pointed in unison toward the end of the street. I nodded and moved on. Behind me, one of them advised, “Always drink pure water. Many a man get
hisself drunk from breakin dis rule.” His colleagues cackled appreciatively. They made other remarks among themselves, their voices a surreal and diminishing drone in back of me.

  I plodded on to the end of the street. On opposite corners were two similar frame houses. The one on the right seemed somehow to suggest Naps’s character—something about the cocky slant of its porch roof—so I tried it. There was no doorbell; I knocked. I knocked for a long time and then pressed my face against the small pane of glass set in the door. When my eyes readjusted to the darkness of the interior all I could make out was a strange blurred swaying movement, but then when my eyes readjusted once more I was startled to discover that this was a Negro woman’s face not five inches away from my own and that it was shaking back and forth while its eyes gazed steadily and coldly at me. I knocked again, but this ulotrichous head only shook more stubbornly. “Naps Hod!” I cried, but she couldn’t hear me through the closed door. I mouthed the name with exaggerated lip movements several times but she couldn’t read it. At last at least she opened the door a crack and said, “We doan want nuthin today.” “Ma’am—” I said. Bam! the door closed again. But unless she was Naps’s mother-in-law or something, this wasn’t the right house anyway. I tried the other. The woman there didn’t want nothing today either, but before she closed the door I managed to convince her that I was only looking for Naps Howard. “Huh-yeah!” she aspirated, and pointed to the woods on the other side of Thirty-sixth Street, where Ringo ceased to exist. A thick little forest of post oaks, their scalloped leaves already deep green and thick. “Where?” I said. “In there,” she said, still pointing a finger straight at the woods. “Where?” I said again, squinting in the direction of her point. “Y’mean elivesun one those trees?” She laughed. “Naw. You go on now. Get off my porch, Mister Alcohol. This a Christian house. You lookin for Naps Howard, that’s where you’ll find him, over there.”