by Paul Hawkins
... a flash of white on toward the depot and the diner.
He went into the diner and stood out like a sun mote floating, and he walked behind the backs of people seated at the counter and several heads turned around as he went past them but no one said a word. He moved on through to the furthest booth and took a seat and sat smiling.
Mr. Perfect squinted across the diner, then shouted, "Jim, Jim Porter?"
A man seated with his family a few booths away looked over. The two children turned their heads, but the mother, dressed for her afternoon in town, snapped their faces to their plates once more.
The man looked over hesitantly, then forced a smile. "Why yes, Mr. White, it's me."
"Why Jim, I haven't seen you in years! Why not come over here and chew the fat a while?"
The man looked to his wife, and after a second his wife nodded to him. "We'll be at the drug store," she said, and she and the two children got up and left. Jim slowly got up and walked over and sat opposite White.
"I remember we were in the FFA together, right?" Mr. Perfect asked.
"Yes – now it seems like ages ago."
"Did I ever tell you how I got my name, Jim?"
"I think maybe, once..."
"... so anyway, Jim, this was when I lived in New York City and even though it was a charity game they needed somebody to throw out the first pitch and since my law firm was helping sponsor the thing the old man chooses me since the other partners are old and fat and afraid to look like sissies. So I go out and the manager sees me put real pepper on the ball and he's feuding with his prima donna pitcher anyway so he says 'let's see what the kid's got.' So they keep me in there and so two, three innings go by and I got a no-hitter going, and everybody's buzzing and asking who I am and someone says he's ..."
'Some folks said it was from bowling."
"Hm?"
"Your name. Some folks said you got it from a bowling score."
A dark look came over Mr. Perfect's face. "Who the hell said it was from bowling?"
"I dunno. Mostly new fellers – there's a lot of new fellers around these days."
"I'd beat the living shit out of anyone who said it was from bowling."
"Well, they don’t know better cuz they're new."
Mr. Perfect leaned back and was pacified a bit. "So anyway there I am still humming them when..."
"Yeah, I know. That's when the giant thunderstorm hits. Biggest one New York seen in 40 years. Game canceled. You tole me ten years ago."
"Charity game," Mr. Perfect re-explained. "Never resumed since it didn't count for anything. Never got to finish."
"You would've pitched a perfect game. You had the pepper."
This pleased Mr. Perfect more than a little. "Sure I would have. Instead of tiring I was getting stronger..."
The man announced he had to meet his family and left but Mr. Perfect did not seem to notice. He sat by himself and his mind was lost in reverie. Then he got up, left, forgot to pay, then went back and paid too much.
He strolled back out into the open air toward the town square, sat on a bench in the park and fished an old envelope from a pocket and began composing on its back a notice to be printed in the paper:
NOTICE!
TO ANYONE PIG-IGNORANT ENOUGH TO THINK EVEN FOR ONE SECOND TO THINK MY NAME TO THINK
NOTICE! TO ANYONE PIG-IGNORANT TO THINK FOR EVEN HALF-A-SECOND TO BELIEVE THAT MY NAME CAME FROM BOWLING ...
He didn't finish it. A tirade like this usually cheered him up but today it did not. He'd get Otto to help him finish it. It must run in the paper tomorrow.
The afternoon had begun to cloud up. He remembered that he and Atalanta had met in the garden by the Negro cemetery one afternoon years ago and suddenly they found out there was nothing to say to each other. She sat and smiled and he stared away and sometimes looked at her and he did not finish his food. He met her later that evening and asked, "If I decide to get the hell out of this town forever will you come with me?"
He did not remember her reply, but if it were affirmative it had did not translated to action. He had lived alone for twenty years.
*
White dozed off on the park bench, and when he woke up his head buzzed and he felt sick. He got up and smoothed his jacket with a surfeit of dignity. The wind began to rise the sky had darkened and he angled across the park to the church. There he roused the old bearish priest to hear his confession. The old man stood in the doorway of the rectory in his undershirt.
"Lemme get my collar on."
"Okay."
They marched into the stuffy church and then into the even stuffier confessional and Mr. Perfect put down his handkerchief to kneel on and stared until the little screened window slid open.
"Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been ... it has been ... say, when'd the first Zeppelin land in New Jersey?"
"Just tell me your sins, my son."
"I killed a man, Father."
"Yes?"
White hissed : "A murr-derr."
"That's serious – go on."
"They say I did it – but he was my art dealer and he swindled some Russians. It got confusing. I only hired him to sleep with his wife and he sold forgeries on the side. When he got caught she wouldn't let me spring him from jail. She hated him. But jail wasn’t good enough fer the Russians, and they saw to it he got fixed."
"But did you kill him?"
"I don't know – this was in Europe – everything gets confusing there. Everybody’s got their hand in something."
"You come back when you can explain it more clearly. Do you have anything else to confess?"
"I don’t know, Father. My head's a blur. Twenty years – a dark mess – blur in a blender."
"Think hard. It's been a long time."
There was a long silence and then White said: "Once I put sugar in your gas tank."
"What?"
"I was a kid in love and you said I had impure thoughts – but what I wanted to talk about was love and you wouldn’t listen – so at night I put sugar in your gas tank."
The priest was silent for a moment. "That wasn't my gas tank."
"What?"
"My car ran fine for years. I don't know whose car you got."
"Good God!" White wailed. "How many other falsehood have I toiled under all these years?"
The old priest coughed and told White to come back when he was sober, scrutinize his conscience better, and donate to the church building fund until it tempered his soul.
White forgot all this the second he fell out of the church doorway and back into the cloudy afternoon. He heard some thunder in the distance. He stepped back out onto the street and a car whizzed past him. He heard the young girls in it laugh and it struck his heart. The sound was so beautiful and young – so beautiful because it was so young.
It began to rain.
White hurried to the sidewalk and the storefront eaves. Once in their shelter he brushed the rain from his sleeves, shook off his hat, and fumbled for a cigarette. He had none. His head began to spin at the very thought of this privation and he walked toward the hotel lobby to purchase more.
As he reached the hotel he saw someone leaving. It was a tall man dressed fine, and a car was waiting for him flanked by a valet holding an umbrella. A small crowd of town-folk stood to see the man as if he were somebody important. Suddenly time stopped in Mr. Perfect's brain. White moved between the man and his car.
"I know you!" he said keenly.
The man was tall and sturdy but with a youthful-looking face. He had almost strode past White but he turned and looked again. Then he reached into an inventory of smiles.
"Why, Ernest White?" he said.
"Yes," White said. "I know you."
"Well, I think you mean my father – Noah Larr – you and him knew each other way back when. He's a congressman now. Everybody says I look just like him. And you – you look just like he said you would. I know you don't get bac
k here much, but he says he hears about you."
White’s head suddenly felt stuffed and clouded and he tried to pull one coherent thought out of the confusion. "You're a congressman?"
The man smiled. "My daddy is, yes sir – I guess that proves there's no accounting for some folks tastes." He turned to the people gathered around, who laughed. "Now if you'll excuse me."
But White continued. "So I was right – there was a murr-der."
"Excuse me?"
"When your dad was sheriff. Ask him if he remembers 1925 – man was lynched and he was sheriff then but did nothing stop it."
"I think should go home and drink some black coffee, Mr. White."
But White persisted." Your dad knew the man was innocent but did nothing to stop it. He knew – we knew – we shoulda stopped it but we didn't."
The handful of people made low noises and the politician's son just shook his head.
"That’s a powerful accusation. I didn't want to have to say this, but you're an odd man, Mr. White."
The crowd muttered agreement but White didn't care. He stared at space until the man who had been in that space was gone. He had gotten in his car and sped away.
"Well, he knows I know," White told himself. "It’s always been that way – I can never not open my mouth. Damn my head hurts."
It began to rain hard and there was nothing left to do in town and he was ready to go home. He fished twenty dollars from his pocket and purchased the doorman's umbrella.
"To hell with this town," he said to himself. He stepped out in the rain.
A hand tugged at his trouser leg. It was the girl he'd seen with the crystal radio to on moving day. She was dressed in boy's clothes.
"I can't get it to work," she said. "It can't get the shows."
He looked at her. Her short hair was matted and lank. She held the radio and there was a large bruise on her cheek.
"Who hit you?" he asked.
She just looked at him.
He put a hand on one of her shoulders and the sight of the angry purple sprawl on her cheekbone sent nausea coiling up inside of him.
"Who hit you?"
A man came running across the street toward White.
"Get your hands off my girl!"
"But somebody hit her."
The man grabbed the girl but White's hand locked down on her shoulder and she screamed. Some instinct deep inside made White try harder to hold her and so the man hit White and he fell in the mud. White tried to grab the man's trouser leg and the man turned and kicked him. Fire lit under his ribs and he clenched them tightly and had gotten halfway up when the man delivered a second kick with his boot. Pain flashed across his chest and for a second he couldn't breathe. But he pushed himself to all fours and was wiping the mud from his face when he heard a voice shouting "Stop! Stop!" and saw Otto coming toward them, his hair plastered by the rain.
"You tell him to keep away from little girls," the man said.
"I'll tell him what I want to!" Otto said, hooking an arm under White and helping him up. "I don’t know what mistaken idea you’re laboring under, but I know sure as hell he didn't start this."
Some onlookers stood by as Otto helped White up then sat him on the edge of the boardwalk. The man he had been fighting turned his back and disappeared through the crowd, and though completely ignorant of the particulars the crowd seemed satisfied that he had somehow meted out what White had coming. White sat in a daze and dabbed at his thoroughly muddied white suit with a handkerchief. Otto pulled the car forward and helped White in.
"What a wonderful town," White said and slumped across the back seat.
"Shut up, Mr. White." Otto said as he shut the door.
White lay back as Otto put the car in gear. "What a wonderful town for boys and dogs and colored folks and girls and picnics and, oh, so wonderful and nice."
"Shut up while I get us the hell out of here."
"Cig'rettes?"
"There's some back there somewhere."
Mr. Perfect found some. He took one out but his hands were shaking so badly he had to have Otto light it. He took it back and winced as he exhaled luxuriously.
"You know what?" he asked.
"I know I'm taking you to a doctor – again – that's what," Otto responded.
But Mr. Perfect reclined in the car's red leather luxury. "I know this – God is dead and the world's his old whore, but I still like this place."
"Me and half the planet wish you'd stop talking like that."
Mr. Perfect slumped and exhaled and rested. He looked out the window. Otto was driving past rows of tenant shacks. Their uniformity began to drowse White to sleep. He closed his eyes and in his mind saw an old abandoned building of the kind that he'd already seen at the center of any of the West's most splendid industrial cities, with scared eyes peeking out of a boarded window.
The car hit a bump and Otto was suddenly working to control the steering wheel.
"What the hell was that?" Mr. White asked, his eyes opening wide.
"Tire's blown out. Hit a board in the road."
'Goddamn everything we've done – everything I've done!" Mr. Perfect wailed.
"Please, Mr. White, not now."
White sat back and puffed a cigarette. Otto fought the wheel and the car came to rest halfway off the road.
Otto hiked his collar up and opened his door. He turned back to his employer. "You stay here."
Mr. Perfect nodded and Otto got out. White watched as his valet circled the car in the rain, inspecting the tires. When Otto went around back to get the spare and the jack from the trunk, Mr. White opened his door and stepped outside. The car was parked on the edge of a slope and White immediately slid down a slick embankment, down through trees and brush. He hit his hard and came to rest with his body splayed across a lower road, wilder and narrower, some fifty yards below the one where Otto struggled with the tire. He tried to raise himself but felt too tired to do it. He drifted off.
His body lay across the lane when a wagon drawn by a downcast horse came up. Beneath a sheltering awning a thin young man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and an oilcloth jacket sat at the reins, and a neat but simply-dressed young woman sat beside him. In back of the wagon beneath a canvas tarp two children sat amidst scattered straw that had cushioned a load of fruit on a trip into town.
"Another drunk?" the woman said. "This town's becoming full of them."
"Another soul to save," the man said. He pulled the reins to bring the horses to a stop. "I'll give him to the mission."
"John, you don't." the woman said. "Mother warned me about you. She said you had the kind of soft heart that would forever be bringing home lost animals and strangers."
"The Lord said we'll be judged on how we treat others."
"Really," the woman said. "There's a reason we never get ahead..."
But before they could continue the argument, they happened to look back down at the road at the same time and notice the body was gone.
*
White himself did not know what happened next or how he’d moved or where he went. Later on he could never tell exactly what had happened. In a reverie he had felt strong and slender arms hook underneath him, and he was dragged from the rain to a place that was warm and full of healing, and though he could not wake he felt their ministrations, the owners of these faces with white light behind them saying "no, not yet – you’ve work to do, you can’t come home yet," and so he let them clean his suit and tend his wounds and place a strong-fragranced poultice of wild herbs on his forehead that instantly relaxed him, and then he sank into even a deeper sleep in which even none of this mattered, save for the remembrance that they were some of the sexiest angels he had ever seen. And then his thoughts began to order themselves outside his volition, and he a mere spectator to them, and they began imposing memories on the town from years ago.
Chapter 7
1905
A man, a woman and a boy walked along the red dirt lane and occasionally a Model
T would pass them, and sometimes a wagon with primly dressed women and stern men, but soon nothing passed them at all.
It was early afternoon and the white sun beamed down through a cloudless sky. They had a long walk from the church to home. They followed the lane past the last house and then through open grassy country and wide vacant fields with scattered wildflowers. The old man walked in front, the woman behind him, and the boy several paces back. If viewed from above they would be three black dots, equidistantly spaced, moving slowly, rarely jogging out of order.
When they got home the boy rushed inside but heard a low flat noise from the old man's throat.
"No running."
The old man never said much. He was tall and thin and had a serious red bony face, and he spoke more often to the neighbor men than to the boy and his mother.
The small boy slowed his pace and began to mount the narrow stairs up to his room to change his clothes. There was no running, no playing, no working for the rest of Sunday, though his mother was allowed to cook supper.
From the top of the stairs he turned to watch his father take off his broad-brimmed hat and dark coat and hang them on pegs in the wall. "That boy," he heard the old man say. But his mother said nothing, and moved into the kitchen.
The boy, who had just turned four, was an only child, and his father never let him help him with the chores. Never leading the horse from his father's lap, no small assignments like gathering eggs or feeding the chickens or brushing the horses. "It's no work for you," the father would say, and turn back to his job. "Go to your mother."
Because he was never expected to work the boy sometimes wondered if he must be sick, and he would look in the bathroom mirror at his thin blonde face and fantasize about the maladies he must have.
*
The boy sometimes tried to tell stories to himself to pass the time, but he didn't know what they should say. He had three small well-worn books he enjoyed – they used to be his mother's when she was a girl: Daniel in the Lion's Den, Joseph and his Coat of Many Colors, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Nebakaneezer's Furnace. But the story of Joseph was the one he liked best – he had taught himself to read at the age of three. He once asked his mother if Joseph's coat had looked like a particularly beautiful sunset, and she had sat with him on the back steps, held him, watched the sunset and said that it had been even more beautiful than that. Ever since then he liked to watch the sunset from the window in his room and watch for particularly brilliant ones, with swirled yellows and fiery purples and dull deep reds, and imagine himself as Joseph, cowing pharaohs with sweeping gestures of his robed arms.
