Soon the sand would shift again so that it would be impossible to say who was buried where.
Willie knelt by the grave and put his hand on the place where they had lowered his father’s body into the soil.
Then he sang the song his father loved:
You’ve got a lot to live,
And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.
The song whispered across the sand like a sad sigh and then was lost in the constant mourning of the wind.
Chapter four
The next spring Willie’s mother and Cool Dawn decided to leave Sandstorm and seek employment in Houston, the great city of Texas.
It was a sad day for Willie.
It meant saying good-bye to all the people he had come to love in Sandstorm.
Good-bye to the old bus that had been home.
Good-bye to the sad Lord in the broken-down church.
Good-bye to the grave of his father.
Willie found that a person becomes attached to sad and painful things and that sometimes even sorrow is hard to give up.
But when the Greyhound bus came into sight of the slick black buildings of Houston, his heart pounded with excitement.
There was a shining busyness about the city—a great adventure was in the air.
There were glittering cars everywhere one turned, handsome stores and office buildings, bright signs that told of magic things people bought and sold to one another.
The two women found a small apartment in an old section of the city.
The apartment was in a five-story tenement of red brick that had been built in the unremembered times. The tenement was called the William McKinley Arms.
One hundred eighty-seven people lived in the William McKinley Arms, most of them black, most of them old, many of them damaged or broken in some way.
The rooms were small, evil-smelling and poorly cared for. They had flaking paint and rattling pipes and floors with holes in them. They were cold in the winter and steaming in the summer.
Many rats had made the William McKinley Arms their year-round residence. No one ever took a census of the rat population of the building, but there were at least two rats for every tenant and then some.
Willie hated and feared the rats, but it was through a rat that he became acquainted with the girl who lived in the flat on the second floor.
One afternoon as he was coming up the stairway from the cement courtyard in back of the tenement, he heard a scream and there was the girl, holding her skinny black arm, bobbing back and forth on the stairs as if she were playing a strange game.
“It bit me!” she cried, and then Willie saw the rat loping down the stairs to the basement, in no particular hurry and certainly not afraid.
There was blood running down the girl’s arm. Willie grabbed her arm and tied his handkerchief around it.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Working,” the girl said, still crying.
“Come with me,” said Willie.
He took her upstairs where Cool Dawn cleaned the bite and gave the girl a glass of milk. Between Cool Dawn’s assurances and Willie’s vow to rid the William McKinley Arms of all rats, she calmed down.
Her name was Carolyn Sage, and her family—father, mother and seven children—had moved into the tenement only last year. She was a tiny girl with thick black hair and wide-set brown eyes, and she was Willie’s exact age.
Carolyn was friendly and cheerful, and she and Willie took to playing together on the cement courtyard in back of the tenement. She was a girl friend rather than a boy friend, which Willie would have preferred then, but she was fun to be with and Willie thought that if he ever had a sister, he would like her to be like Carolyn.
Carolyn’s family had a television set, and that first summer because Willie had never seen television before, he and Carolyn watched hours of television shows.
Willie was fascinated by all that he saw. He could not believe all that was going on in the world. For the first time he saw with his own eyes some of the sights his father had once told him about: the vast cities beyond Houston, the airplanes and the great sea vessels, the animals that lived in different parts of the world, the cars that people owned, the houses they lived in, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the incredible things they did.
Sometimes the words used on television were hard to understand, and Carolyn would have to explain. Her mother was Mexican, and the Sage family had lived in a Mexican town before moving to Houston, so that Carolyn understood Spanish quite well. Sometimes she and Willie would speak that language rather than English, though Willie’s mother and Cool Dawn objected to this very much.
When they weren’t watching television, Willie and Carolyn explored the tenement, visiting their neighbors.
There was Mrs. Sarto who lived in a room in the basement—a room with walls that were covered with pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She sat in her room all day long, with a cat whose name was Poppino, and prayed her rosary. Sometimes she got Carolyn and Willie to pray with her, but they preferred to play with Poppino.
“What is wrong with you, boy?” Mrs. Sarto asked Willie one day.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“You are colored wrong,” the old woman said.
Afterwards. Willie asked Carolyn what Mrs. Sarto meant.
Carolyn hesitated a little and then said, “You look different is all.”
“Why?”
“Just different.”
There was Mrs. Morgan who was ninety years old and very deaf and who had a phonograph on which she played a certain song over and over again. It was a song from the unremembered times sung by a singer of the older days named F. Sinatra.
The song was called Come Fly with Me.
Carolyn and Willie used to sing the song, stretching out their arms like the singers they had seen on old-time TV movies, until they shrieked with laughter. Mrs. Sarto said that the song Mrs. Morgan played was Ave Maria, a song of praise to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that it was not right to laugh at holy songs, and she blamed their laughing on Willie’s color.
“They made you up,” Mrs. Sarto said to him. “It is a trick to frighten me. To color someone that way—it isn’t fair.”
There was Mr. Pitt, a black man of about fifty, who had lost his hands in some war. He read True Horror Comics all day, turning the pages with strange hook devices that he had for hands, and he would nod his head and mumble strange things that could not be understood.
Sometimes Willie and Carolyn would ask Mr. Pitt to show them the Purple Heart Medal he had won in combat.
With his hooks Mr. Pitt would pull the medal out of his shirt pocket—he carried it with him always—and dangle it before them.
“It’s very pretty,” Carolyn would say, or, “It is a nice thing to have.”
“Proof,” Mr. Pitt would reply. “Proof positive.”
Willie and Carolyn did not know what proof it was Mr. Pitt was talking about and were afraid to ask.
But one afternoon Mr. Pitt, having shown them the medal, said, “Now this is justice and justification that the Lord has given me—in case I am questioned.”
“What is the question?” Willie asked.
Mr. Pitt’s eyes narrowed, the veins of his forehead stood out, his mouth opened and closed several times. Then he said, “If your hand scandalizeth thee, what do you do, boy?”
Willie did not know.
Mr. Pitt’s eyes burned with a strange light; his voice became high and shaky.
“Cut it off!” he said.
“Let’s go,” said Carolyn.
“Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”
Mr. Pitt held up his hooks, looking at them as if they belonged to another person.
“Now there can be no scandal.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”
“Good-bye—Good-bye, Mr. Pitt.”
Outside in the courtyard Carolyn said that Mr. Pitt was crazy. But Willie believed that Mr. Pitt was a special person who understood secrets about the world that othe
r people didn’t know anything about.
* * *
Willie loved to get up early in the morning before anyone else was out of bed and go out into the cement courtyard and watch the sun come up.
Early one morning he came out to the courtyard and found a dead bird lying there.
He picked up the bird and studied it, feeling sorry for it and wondering where it had come from.
It was a brown and black bird with a speckled gray breast and a white beak.
It did not seem to have a wound of any kind, but it was dead all the same.
Willie tried to find a place to bury the light feathery thing which he thought to be most beautiful. But there was nothing but cement in the courtyard, and he could not make a grave in the cement.
He went around to the front of the William McKinley Arms where there were two narrow rectangles of grass between the walk and the street.
He got a soup spoon from the kitchen and dug a small grave for the bird and was about to put the bird in the grave when he spotted another bird lying on the walk.
This bird had an orange breast and a black-hooded head and was larger than the first bird and even more beautiful.
When he picked it up, the bird’s head lolled back and there was no doubt he was dead too, without a wound or any visible damage.
He set to digging a second grave.
Just then the neighborhood police officer, whose name was Harlowe Judge, came strolling by on his first round of the day.
“What you got there, boy?” Officer Judge asked.
“A bird. Two dead birds.”
“What you doin’ with two dead birds, boy?”
“I found them.”
“Where is it you found them, boy?”
“In the back and one here on the walk.”
“What is it you fixin’ to do with two dead birds, boy?” said Officer Harlowe Judge, who wore thick goggles whenever he made his rounds.
“Bury them.”
“Where you goin’ to bury your two dead birds, boy?”
“Here, in the grass.”
“That’s where you are wrong, boy,” said Officer Harlowe Judge. “Diggin’ holes in city property is against the law. Give me your birds, boy.”
Willie gently picked up the small light brown and black bird and then the larger orange-breasted bird and handed them to Officer Harlowe Judge.
Officer Judge studied the birds, turning them over and squeezing them in his huge hands.
Then he said, “Birds dyin’ all over, boy. Which does not cut any ice. Understand, boy?”
“No sir.”
“What I am sayin’, boy, is that I catch you diggin’ again, there’ll be Jesus to answer to all over this zoo.”
Then Officer Harlowe Judge said, “You take right good care of yourself, old redhead, and keep it straight,” and walked away.
At the corner he stopped and put the dead birds in a rubbish bin that stood there with strange words painted on its sides in great red letters.
Willie could not make out the words, but Carolyn said that the words were, A FREE WORLD IS A CLEAN WORLD.
* * *
Willie and Carolyn watched the television shows and visited the people of the tenement, and Willie found more dead birds. He asked his mother and Cool Dawn and Carolyn and Mrs. Sarto and Mrs. Morgan what was happening to the birds. No one knew.
The summer was very hot and Houston was a strange place to be, but it was full of wonders too, and Willie was happy.
Then one night there was the sound of an ambulance and a great commotion in the hallway, and Willie awoke and Cool Dawn and Willie’s mother were at the doorway, and there were many people in the hallway and Mrs. Sarto was crying, and then they were carrying someone out on a stretcher, and
Willie saw the red stain on a blanket and the hook dangling down from the blanket, and Mrs. Sarto was screaming, “He tore his eyes out! Out of his own head!” The women made Willie go back to bed, and he lay there a long time thinking about what he had seen. The next morning Cool Dawn told him Mr. Pitt had died, and Willie thought of Mr. Pitt often after that and wondered what he knew, the secrets he possessed, and he asked his mother and Cool Dawn why he died, but neither of them knew, and neither did Carolyn know.
Willie’s mother found a job in the Rib N Rum Room, a magic place illuminated by green lights that stood near a highway where cars went whizzing along at ninety miles per hour.
Every night at 6:30 she took a bus to the Rib N Rum Room, and she did not get back to the apartment until sometime in the night when Willie was asleep.
With her first paycheck Willie’s mother bought him some clothes and told him it was time to get ready for school.
And then the summer ended and Willie was seven years old and Carolyn and he went to be enrolled in the Saint Martin de Porres School five blocks from the William McKinley Arms and life changed again.
Willie still thought very often of Sandstorm and of his father, but sometimes at night he would fall asleep and wake up suddenly and see the silver hook dangling from under the white shroud, and he wondered when they would tell him the secrets.
Chapter five
The utter mystery of school began, and Willie went into it like a frail vessel going into a storm at sea, and the vessel was buffeted by many waves and nearly sank.
In the first place, in all of the population of Saint Martin de Porres school, Willie knew no one but Carolyn Sage.
In the second place, Willie could not even speak with most of the boys and girls of his class or understand things they said to one another.
Then there was the matter of his strange looks. The students would ask him what had happened to him and where he came from and how he came to be the way he was. Even when he understood the question, Willie did not know how to answer.
Finally, Willie did not know anything the school taught, even simple things everyone else seemed to know before school began.
After school started most of the students of Martin de Porres could read at least a few words. They learned to look at the letters printed in books and make words out of them. They came to know something about numbers. They could write words on the blackboard or call them out when Sister wrote them there. They could print their names at the top of their papers. They could follow the tele-lessons on the miniature TV screens beside their desks.
Willie could do none of these things. He turned his papers in blank, with nothing written on them. He watched the tele-lessons carefully but couldn’t understand what the TV teachers said.
When one of the Sisters would call on Willie in class, he would smile uncertainly and say in Spanish, “I don’t know.”
He said this in a soft little singsong voice that made the other students laugh.
For three whole months the only thing Willie ever said in his first classroom was, “I don’t know.”
On the playground the other children would tease Willie.
Some of them called him “I-don’t-know.”
One day on the playground, an older boy from another class picked Willie up and held him above his shoulders.
“What’ll you give for a redheaded nigger?” he shouted.
The children standing nearby laughed.
“Mama,” said Willie that night, “what is a nigger?”
Willie’s mother stood still at the stove for a moment. Then she put her hand on Willie’s red hair and kissed him on the cheek.
“Grandmother,” said Willie, “what does nigger mean?”
“It is only a word,” Cool Dawn replied.
“But still it has a meaning,” said Willie.
Willie’s mother said it was a stupid name people sometimes gave to black people.
“Why?” Willie asked.
Neither the mother nor the grandmother had the answer to that.
The next day Sister Juanita was telling the class about God. She said that God was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good. She said that God loved all people and was the father of everybody in the wo
rld. She said that God loved the world so much that he sent his son into it so that he might die on the cross for the sins of man.
When the class was over, Sister Juanita came down to Willie’s desk and spoke to him in Spanish.
“Willie, do you understand what I have been saying?”
“No Sister,” said Willie.
“What don’t you understand?”
“I don’t understand anything,” Willie answered.
“Then let’s begin to learn,” said Sister Juanita. “After all, you will have to learn your catechism so that you can make your First Communion.”
“Yes Sister,” Willie said.
“Each day I will help you to learn the English. That is your problem. You do not understand the words in the books and on the TV.”
“Yes Sister.”
“Each day we shall take a new word and learn it. Soon you will catch up with the others and know what all the others know.”
Willie could hear the other children out on the playground.
“Let’s begin right now,” said Sister Juanita, pushing a button on her tele-teacher. “Look at this picture and let us see how many things we can name.”
The picture on the screen showed a boy named Dick and a girl named Jane with a dog called Spot.
Sister Juanita pointed to Dick.
“We just saw this story today, so I know you know who this is.”
Willie looked at the white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.
“Dick,” said Willie.
“Very good,” said Sister Juanita. She wrote Dick’s name on the blackboard.
“What did we say Dick was doing?”
Willie could not remember.
“We just had the story an hour ago,” Sister Juanita said.
Willie looked at the screen and tried to remember. He wanted to please Sister Juanita, who was trying to help him learn. Then it came to him that he knew something about Dick, though he had forgotten whether it had been mentioned in the story or not.
“Well,” he said, “Dick is not a nigger.”
* * *
After school one night Willie found Mrs. Sarto sitting in the chair in the hallway. She looked like she had been waiting for him all day.
The Last Western Page 2
