The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  He was silent a moment, and then he spoke very quietly. “I thought you’d done guessed it on your own,” he said. “You remember one of the things she wrote on that wall: ‘Slater, put your money where your mouth is.’ He wasn’t no more potent than that there gelding horse of his. Ever now and then he’d just lick her off, that’s all. Poor bastard, I reckon it was the only way a screwed-up sonofabitch like him could get any kicks, any fun.”

  “But she didn’t…she didn’t—” I couldn’t say it.

  “No,” he said. “She never did.”

  Chapter forty-five

  Across the municipal golf course fairways and through the woods of War Memorial Park in the darkness and the staggering rain I ambled, all the way to Twelfth Street, before I decided that I couldn’t go on getting myself and Naps’s suit so wet, so at Twelfth Street I stopped and stood under a large hickory tree whose heavy branches partially sheltered me. A few taxis eventually passed, and I hailed them, but they wouldn’t stop, probably because I was a sorry spectacle, standing rain-drenched under a tree on a barren stretch of West Twelfth. I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and waved it in the air as the next cab came along, and this fellow spotted the lure and screeched to a stop. I got in and rested. “Where to?” he asked.

  Margaret had stopped me as I was passing out through the lobby of St. Vincent’s and had asked me to wait for her while she talked with Dall. Why? I had asked her, and she had said that she would give me a ride home or anywhere but she would like it if she and I could go somewhere and talk some more; there were still many things to talk about, she had said, before I could consider my Little Rock visit completed. But I had declined—out of weariness, of lingering shock, of vicarious disgust, I don’t know, I only know that I had had at that moment an irresistible urge to get out of that hospital, so I had told her I would see her again tomorrow but for the time being I wanted to go my own way. She had released my arm, looked at me for a long moment with a searing gaze both quizzical and wistful of those gray-green eyes of hers, and then she had let me go. Out into the rain I had plunged, asking myself: What kind of squeamish puritan are you, anyway?

  “Where to, buddy, huh?” the cab driver said again, glancing at me over his shoulder with a suspicious and contemptuous stare. I gave him Naps’s address: 3700 Ringo. Why am I going there? I wondered. Just to return his suit? For solace, sympathy? Do I always—have I always wanted to seek out Naps in moments of distress or anguish? Or is it just his bottle of Jack Daniels that I am seeking? The old white landowner of the South, the master, ole massa, did he, beset with inextricable problems economic or domestic—a falling crop, a nagging wife—seek out a favorite, trusted slave and confide in him and share a bottle of Southern Comfort with him and receive reassurance from him? Nub and Naps, a perfect pair.

  When we turned finally into the last dirt-road stretch of the southern part of Ringo Street, the cab driver, seeing the dilapidated slums, called annoyedly over his shoulder, “Hey, you sure you know where you’re goin?”

  “Quite sure,” I said. “Just shut up and drive.” I hate cab drivers, as a rule.

  “Listen,” he said, suddenly slowing the car and turning to glower at me, “you caint talk to me like that, I don’t care who you are.”

  “You’re the driver, I’m the fare,” I said menacingly. “I tell you to go somewhere, you go there, hear?”

  He stopped the car completely. “Hey, how would you like to just get out and walk?” he challenged me.

  “How would you like a poke in the mush?” I retorted.

  “You and who else, Shorty?” he platituded.

  “Me, myself, and I,” I trited.

  “Ganging up on me, eh? Hawr! hawr!” he said mock-jovially, and then he opened his door and stepped out, and he opened my door and said to me in a very cold voice, “Get out.”

  I got out. He wasn’t much taller than I, albeit a good bit stockier. About thirty I would say, and a veteran of numerous altercations. We were near a lone street lamp, whose light gave an ominous, sinister quality to his scowling face. I wondered if I had arrived at my Waterloo, and, thinking of Waterloo, I remembered that the suit I was wearing belonged to Napoleon Howard. I removed the coat, folded it neatly and placed it on the rear seat of the cab, out of the rain. Then I said to my adversary, mock-prissily, “My dear fellow, I suppose you know that if we engage in fisticuffs, you will lose not only the fare but the tip as well.”

  “You can take the goddamn fare and tip and—” and he suggested a coarse way of disposing of them. Then he swung at me. He swung again. And again, harder. It must be awfully frustrating to swing constantly at a target which is never motionless long enough to be hit.

  Then I swung. Oof! he uttered spontaneously as his gut caved in. All my grudges against the nasty playwright I would vent on this stupid cabbie. “Take that, Slater, you bastard!” I spat at him and threw another one at him, on the jaw. “That’s for Dall!” I let him know. Then I slugged him in the stomach again. “And that’s for me!” I said. He was beginning to crumple, but I had time for one more shot, a real beauty right between the eyes. “And that,” I said as he fell face forward unconscious into the mud, “was for Margaret.”

  I picked him up out of the mud and placed him on the front seat of his cab, but he rolled off onto the floor. I left him there, and, after replacing my coat, I continued down Ringo Street on foot. Maybe some local colored citizens would find him and rob him and roll him into the gutter.

  Tatrice answered the door. “Heavens, Nub, get yourself in out of that rain!” She led me into the living room and told me to make myself a big drink while she ran upstairs to fetch me some dry clothes to put on.

  “Where’s Naps?” I asked.

  “He’s out at Slater’s place with his friend Feemy,” she said.

  I helped myself to the Jack Daniels, pouring several fingers into an oversize tumbler filled with ice. She returned with some fresh sport togs and a bathrobe. She asked me if I had eaten any supper. “Of course,” I said. It was almost ten o’clock. But then I realized I hadn’t had any supper, and I said, “No, not really, but that’s all right, I’m not very hungry.”

  But she insisted on giving me something to eat. While she was occupied in the kitchen, I removed my wet clothes and put on the dry ones. Then I searched through Naps’s collection of stereo tapes, selected Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and put it on the hi-fi. Then I sat down on the deep-pile rug to drink and relax. Tatrice returned with a tray of club sandwiches, olives, pickles, potato chips and all, and put it down on the rug where I could get at it. Then she made herself a small drink and sat down in a nearby chair.

  “Awful rain,” she said. “What were you—?” She stopped, then spoke again, in alarm, “Nub, your hand! What happened? Your knuckles are bleeding.”

  I looked down. Sure enough. “I—” I said.

  She dashed off down the hall, and returned in a twinkling with a medicine kit. She took my hand in hers and mercurochromed the knuckles, then spread two Band-Aids across them. “What happened?” she wanted to know. “What have you been up to?”

  So I told her. I don’t suppose it was a very good conversation topic, but it seemed to amuse her. Just the sound of my own voice speaking conversationally, pleasantly, quite convivially, seemed to restore some of my equilibrium and replenish my dwindling humors. Tatrice is an excellent listener, that much must be said for her. The Dvorak stereo tape had reached that excruciatingly poignant portion known as “Going Home.” Loosened up, I decided to tell Tatrice other things too, about Margaret, and about Dall, and about myself: the things that had been happening lately. She listened a long time, nodding her head at this point, shaking it at that point, contributing an occasional word, a “Lands!” or a “Heavens!” or a “Sure enough?” which opened floodgates of fresh confessions and grievances. Between her and Jack Daniels my soul was laid bare.

  When I came finally to a long pause during which I was momentarily taxed for words, she spoke up. “Nu
b, what can we do for you?” she asked, her head tilted sideways in an expression of warm compassion.

  “How do you mean?” I said, taken slightly aback. It had not occurred to me that there was anything anybody could do for me.

  “To cheer you up,” she said. “To make you believe that you haven’t come home in vain.”

  I was about to answer when there came a great knocking at the front door. Tatrice and I exchanged puzzled glances, both wondering who it could be that was not bothering to use the doorbell. Then she got up and went to the front door. I remained seated on the rug and watched.

  She opened the door, and three white men came quickly into the house. One of them I recognized to my horror: the vanquished cab driver. He spotted me and pointed a long shaking finger at me and said, “That’s him!” and then the three of them advanced. One was carrying a two-foot length of lead pipe, another brandished a tire jack, my cab driver raised a stiletto. Tatrice screamed. One of the men grabbed her and clamped his hand over her mouth.

  “This nigger gal your wife?” he said to me. “Tell her to keep her mouth shut if she knows what’s good for her.”

  The cab driver appraised her. “Got him a piece of dark meat for a wife,” he said. “He’s the type.”

  They roamed leisurely around the room, enjoying their moment, relishing their grand entrance. “Fancy place you got here, buddy boy, even if it is in Niggerville,” one of them said. “Too bad we got to mess it up for you.”

  I was standing up now. Come home, Naps, we need you, quick. They began to circle around me. Little Lucy came into the room, rubbing her eyes. “Tell the pickaninny to git back to bed if she don’t want to watch her poppa git his ass dragged,” said the fellow who was holding Tatrice, and he released her mouth.

  “Ask her to leave the room,” I said to Tatrice, and she, calmer now, instructed Lucy to return to bed. The girl did.

  “Well now,” said the cab driver, “think you’re the champ, don’t you?” He slapped me viciously with the back of his hand. “Think you’re a hot-shit, huh? When we get through with you, Shorty, you aint gonna be a cold turd.”

  The one holding Tatrice said to her, “Honey, I got to let go of you now, cause I got to help my buddies beat the crap out of your white lover-boy, but if you open your mouth again or try to do anything, see, I’m gonna take this here pipe and ram it all the way up your sweet black cunt.” Then he let go of her and she stood rigidly as if paralyzed.

  They came at me. Tatrice reached out a hand and flicked a switch which turned off all the lights.

  When she turned them back on again, less than a minute later, she was holding a .45 pistol in her trembling hand. She surveyed the room, then looked at her pistol and said, “Well, looks like I don’t need this after all, do I?” and she put it aside and fetched her medicine kit again. “You all right?” she asked, looking me over. “No cuts? No bruises? No concussions?” I assured her I was just fine. “Naps told me you were a holy terror,” she said. “But I still don’t see how you did it.” An old trick, I explained: you take your knee, see, and you drive it up against their privates, which is just about the awfulest pain there is, and then, as they double in awful torment, you take the side of your hand and slash it down across the back of their neck. Puts them out cold. She giggled. “Busts their balls too, I bet!” she said, and then she flushed in embarrassment. “But three of them…?” she said, puzzled. Well, I said, I only got one of them. I guess the other two must have taken care of each other…

  I called Curly at the station house and asked him to send somebody out to remove the bodies. He came himself, accompanied by Jack. He looked the place over, studied Tatrice and me carefully, and then asked me, “What am I supposed to charge them with?”

  “Assault and battery. Breaking and entering. Indecent language. Possession of illegal weapons. And if you need anything else, call Dall at the hospital and he’ll tell you a bunch of other things. He’s not going to like this. Not at all.”

  They revived the ruffians and herded them into a squad car. I asked Curly before he left, “Any luck finding Slater yet?” He said the sheriff had spotted him on his horse out in his woods during the afternoon and they were closing in on him, but hadn’t caught him yet.

  We made more drinks, stronger this time because of nervous prostration; Tatrice had to break out a new bottle. But within half an hour we had managed to forget entirely the upsetting visitation. We told each other cheerful jokes. I told her anecdotes I had picked up at Yale; she told me old Negro tales. We had a good time.

  I asked her when she thought Naps might come home. She said she didn’t know. “That man comes and goes, just comes and goes. I never know when to expect him. Sometimes I don’t even know where he is. Most likely he’s going to stay the whole night out there.”

  We talked about names. Naps, she said, was not simply an abbreviation of Napoleon. “Naps” is also a venerable old word used by Negroes to refer to themselves in the plural, meaning the “nappy-haired” Negroes, those with thick woolly hair. Well then, I suggested, his name is symbolic of the whole ulotrichous race? “He likes to think of it that way,” she said, and then she examined my nickname and analyzed it for me. “Nub” can mean, in addition to a small person, many things in various argots: the point or gist of a story, a small or imperfect ear of Indian corn, anything small or imperfect or—she hesitated—worthless. Some darkies use it to mean an unborn child. That’s me, I said, an unborn child. Nub the Unborn Child, I repeated, turning it over and over on my thickened tongue. Then I asked her what her name meant. She said her maiden name was Thelma Beatrice Plunkett, and the “Tatrice,” which rhymes with mattress, came from that particular pronunciation of Beatrice. She was from Hamburg, Arkansas, and she had met Naps at Arkansas A. M. & N. College in Pine Bluff, where she had been a Home Economics major. “Beatrice,” I said, rather tipsily, “you’re the cutest colored chick I ever did see.” You’re not such a bad ofay mortal yourself, she said.

  Hastily and with no little abashment we changed the subject, and began to talk about that one interest which we most had in common: antiques. I swear, that girl knew more about the subject than my boss Clara Ovett did, and we thoroughly explored it as a topic of conversation, treating particularly the early primitive furniture of the Southland. The hour was late, but she showed no inclination to retire, and for my part I welcomed with open arms the opportunity to get my mind off Margaret by talking at length with somebody else.

  I don’t know how it happened. Somewhere long after midnight I was all wound up in a dissertation on American folk art and why there is no folk art being created in America today because of the dissolution of our society, and probably I was rather incoherent and drunkenly plaintive: I remember citing the old wooden folk sculpture as an example, the beautiful ship’s figureheads, the cigar-store Indians, the carved weathervanes, the quaint old merry-go-round horses, the shop signs and other examples of wonderful American wood carving which were not being made any more, would never be made any more, because the America of today had completely lost touch with its roots and…And she said something to me and then she had to say it again before I stopped talking and I realized how tight and wandering I must have been. “I’ve got a lovely wooden statue of an old dancing Negro down in the workshop,” she was saying.

  “Dancing Negro? Dancing Negro? Dancing? Negro?”

  “Yes. I just found it yesterday in a junk shop over on East Ninth.”

  “Junk shop? East Ninth?”

  “That’s right. Would you care to go down and take a look at it?”

  “Down?”

  Chapter forty-six

  In the cold light of dawn, waking up in the same bed I had slept in the last time I stayed there, I gazed up at the ceiling and asked myself what kind of dirty bastard was I, anyway. Outside it was still raining; in the grove of post oaks the rain was a loud jeweled curtain. Margaret was right, I reflected, she was absolutely right in the reservations she had had about me: I am dishonest, I
am a dishonest cheat. What have I done? What have I done? Of all things, my good friend’s own wife. An overpowering and disconcerting sense of déjà vu: the cluttered repository of old furniture, the single shielded bulb burning from somewhere up in the dark vault of the ceiling, yea, even the words: pick it up, see how solid it is, and: virgin oak, beautiful finish, so nicely put together, and: so rare, I wish I had it for my own, and: I’m tempted to steal it. I had been irresponsibly drunk and my eyes had been purblind; all I could remember distinctly was the table, a long drop-leaf harvest table with peg legs, circa 1815, from which all the paint and varnish had been removed. Hard birch. And I remembered my debased mind asking: the white landowner of the old South, ole massa the profligate and dissolute wretch, did he, beset with unresolved lust because of a cold wife, seek out a favorite slave girl and receive relief from her? We are all victims of the South’s final damnation. But then what? What had I done? It was all empty. Tabula rasa. Somehow I must have got up here to this guest room, and to bed…

  Now, by thunderation, what pangs the morning brought! My anxious heart, thumping, said: repent repent repent. Kill yourself, a panicked conscience urged me; if you don’t, Naps will come home and do it for you. Or run away: sneak out the window and off through the oak grove; get back to Boston; you got what you came for. Base scoundrel!

  The sound of an automobile coming down the driveway lifted me out of bed. I went to the window and looked out. It was the Lincoln. It stopped at the front entrance, and Naps got out. Then Margaret got out. Margaret?! Pity sakes, everybody is coming, coming to accuse me! Next will arrive an ambulance, with Dall on a stretcher. Then will come a Chevrolet with my father and grandmother. Bringing up the rear will be a television truck with Hy Norden and a station wagon with the entire press corps. All of them coming to point their fingers at me and prosecute me and condemn me. I crawled under the bed and lay there trembling, waiting.