The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  For one quick, insane moment, I cursed the miracle sitting on top of my King James-shaped head.

  The bitch. To hell with her. Tawny tiger smasher. I’d be as cool as Casanova.

  Frowning, I jabbed a cigarette into the corner of my sensual thick lips.

  “It’s all the same to me, cupcake.”

  Stretching languidly, The Deb said, “Why do you treat me like this? I know you’re kind and gentle. I can tell by your eyes. You look like one of those saint types I read about in grade school.”

  Clever, a cornucopia of cleverness. Supple, sweet. A young luxurious mountain.

  I stalked over to the sofa bed. “Kiss me, baby,” I said, the cigarette dangling out of the corners of my mouth.

  “No.”

  “Broads,” I spat.

  “I’m like any girl. I like to be pleased.”

  I wanted to cry out against my own helplessness. “But, baby,” I tried to explain, “didn’t I show you a good time? Weren’t you pampered all through dinner by the plus-ultra service way up on the sixty-fifth floor of the glittery Rainbow Room? And what about the fizzy discothèque . . . where we were mobbed by all those frug people who thought we were Egyptians, and later we breezed uptown in a Duesenberg from Buckingham livery. Jesus, woman.”

  “That’s all very true,” The Deb said, “but you didn’t give me any money to get my hair fixed.”

  “Tomorrow, love. You’d only get it messed up in bed.”

  “You don’t want me to have my hair fixed,” The Deb protested.

  “That’s no way to talk. Tomorrow, love. Tomorrow I’ll see personally that you get the works at Helena Rubinstein.”

  The Deb sulked. Her body was rigid on the sofa bed. “You foreigners are just like white people. You don’t like to see Negroes with good hair. You’re not just satisfied with getting your rocks off . . . you like to get an extra kick. By running your hand through kinky hair!”

  “You don’t understand,” I said weakly.

  “Oh, but I do! I got your number, sweetcakes.”

  “But you’ve got such wonderful hair. So natural. You want to be different, don’t you?”

  “I am different,” The Deb informed me.

  “Not if you have curly hair like me.”

  The Deb looked hard at me. “When I get my hair fixed tomorrow I will be like you. Almost, anyway. And pretty soon us colored people will be as white as Americans. They gonna make some pills that will turn you white overnight. Won’t that be a bitch? Everybody will be up shit’s creek then.”

  “You’ll take all the excitement and drama out of being Negro,” I laughed.

  “Have you ever wanted to be a Negro? I’m not talking about daydreaming of being a Negro. I mean, have you really considered it?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “Then why have you got that suntan?” The Deb asked.

  “I suppose for the same reason that you want curly hair.”

  “According to the Bill of Rights, which I read in grade school, being black is a sin in this country. But I never heard of curly hair being a sin.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Now come on and give daddy a kiss.”

  “You know what you can do for me.”

  “Are you gonna be discriminating, after all I’ve done for you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I simply said no.”

  “You’re a strange girl.”

  “You’re pretty funny yourself,” The Deb glared.

  Feeling an acute sense of shame, I knelt reverently beside the sofa bed. “I’m sorry, love.”

  “You don’t love me,” The Deb pouted.

  “Why do you wanna act this way?”

  “You know why.”

  “Does that really move you?”

  The Deb grazed a smooth, fine brown leg against my cheek. “Pretty please.”

  I thought I’d die. Racked with desire, I buried my head against the side of the sofa bed.

  Lightly, with the most feminine of touches, The Deb caressed The Wig.

  I stiffened. Buckets of anger clogged my blood. A rebellious rage engulfed me.

  “If you touch my head . . .” I warned.

  “Well. I do declare. If that’s the way you feel.”

  “I’m sorry,” I cried, biting my tongue, giving my hot hands orders to patrol The Deb’s body.

  Her flesh was warm. “Delicious,” my hands radioed to my brain, and then returned to their reconnaissance patrol.

  “I’ll do anything for you, cupcake.”

  “Then do it.”

  I stood up. “You like it, don’t you?”

  “It sends me clear out of this world.”

  “You’re just like a junkie,” I teased. “Ordinary please doesn’t move you.”

  I looked down at The Deb’s face warped with pain. She closed her eyes and moaned. “Stop it! Stop torturing me. I can’t stand it. Play the goddam record.”

  I went quickly over to the record player and put on “Rocking With It.”

  “Oh. You’re so good to me. Come here, lover. I wanna give you the kiss-kiss of the year.”

  But I had to make a quick run to the bathroom, and when I returned, “Rocking With It” was almost over.

  I went straight to the sofa bed. Driven by passion such as I had never known, I tried to ram my tongue down The Deb’s throat.

  She squirmed under my power and I understood the lust of the conquistadors.

  “Daddy,” she begged, “turn on the other side of ‘Rocking With It.’”

  “In a minute, cupcake.”

  “I’m gonna scream!”

  “Scream,” I laughed. “Scream your fucking head off. I’ve got you covered.”

  Eleven

  MORNING CAME as I knew it would: gray with rain. Cooing pigeons and doves. The smell of bacon grease and burnt toast and powerful black Negro coffee, spiced with potents which would enable you to face The White Man come Monday morning. The sound of Mrs. Tucker’s Carolina litany could be heard through the wall. A typical Sunday morning.

  Grateful, I reached up and touched something unfamiliar: The Wig, silky and very much together. Then I began to doze, until I felt The Deb’s lips against my neck.

  “Les, honey,” she yawned. “Be a good boy. Don’t be a finky-foo.”

  “No,” I mumbled. “Not the first goddam thing in the morning.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Go back to sleep. It’s early.”

  “Oh. You’ll be sorry.”

  “Knock it off, cupcake.”

  “I hate you!”

  I had to quiet the bitch. So I pinched one buttock and commanded: “Sleep or else I knock you out of bed.”

  “No, you won’t,” The Deb sneered. “I’m getting up. I’m cutting out. ‘Go back to sleep, cupcake,’” The Deb mimicked.

  She was up now, prowling around the room like an early-morning hag.

  “Oh, you’re one labrador retriever in the bed,” she said angrily. “But ask a simple favor like turning on the record player for a little good music, and . . . finky-foo.”

  I covered my head with the sheet and presently there was no longer the lazy beat of raindrops, or the cooing of pigeons and doves.

  Early morning had exploded. The Deb had “Rocking With It” on real loud.

  Bolting up in bed, I shouted: “Are you satisfied?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  I watched her dress, each deft movement timed to the rocking music. I felt forlorn, for there is nothing worse than a lovers’ quarrel on a rainy Sunday morning. I wanted to jump out of bed and hug and kiss The Deb and say: “Baby, if that’s what you wanna hear, it’s all right with me.”

  No, I’d hold out. After all, I was Bewigged and possessed a great future, that no one could deny.

  “So you’re cutting out,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  Dammit! If I had had my own natural kinky hair, “my thorny crown” (a most powerful weapon, I suddenly realized), The Deb wouldn�
�t be switching her tail around, acting so high and mighty. She would have known by the texture of my hair that I was a mean son of a bitch. I’d have made her eat dirt.

  She stood in the center of the room giving me the evil eye with her legs spread apart like those butch fruit cowboys on television and tore the wrapper from a stick of chewing gum and threw it on the floor.

  “I’m cutting, shithead,” The Deb said. “When you get some loot, and that means money, drop around. I sorta like you, I do.” And she left, giving the door a good bang.

  I lay on that cold bed, twisting, turning. I wanted to go out and strangle every last one of those pigeons and doves in the name of love and then cook them for dinner. Suffering, I didn’t feel romantic or noble about letting The Deb walk out on me. Why couldn’t I have found a chick who was strictly a Wig lover? No, I like drama. I had to be someone else. I had such a celestial picture of being someone else, and a part of the picture was that my luck would change. But had it? No, life still seemed to have me by the balls, stuffing poison enemas up my ass.

  “Oh, well, tomorrow’s Monday,” I said aloud to the cockroaches on the ceiling pipes.

  Then, like the first trumpet of morning, piercingly alive, like the cello of death, Nonnie Swift screamed.

  “No,” I sighed. In a gesture of rejection, I crossed my hands over my penis.

  “Help,” Nonnie cried. “I mean it this time.”

  “That’s what the would-be suicide said when he slipped accidently off the bridge,” I thought happily.

  “Help! Help!”

  The voice was coming closer. A mad bat with a human voice was running amok in the hall.

  A rattling rap on the door.

  “Les!”

  I felt as if the skin were peeling off my face.

  “Do you want me to break the door down?” Nonnie shouted. “I know you’re in there. I always thought you were a gentleman like those cotton planters who used to court me down in New Orleans. I never thought you’d let the rats eat me up!”

  I wanna tell you: pins and needles pricked my body. Rising slowly to a lotus position, I felt the glow from The Wig. My Imperial lips quivered. Tremors shook my brain. Starry brain pellets finally exploded.

  Rats. Rats! The Magic Word.

  I jumped out of bed, slid into my pants, ran to the closet, and grabbed my spear gun.

  Barechested, barefooted, I was sort of an urban Tarzan, a knight without a charger.

  “Where are the rats?” I shouted, storming out the door.

  “My hero,” Nonnie sang. Her face set like stone. “They’re in my room. Where the hell do you think they’re at?”

  “Lead the way, woman.”

  “Follow me,” Nonnie said.

  And I followed, hot with excitement, clutching my spear gun, ready for the kill. One hundred rat skins would make a fine fur coat for The Deb.

  Twelve

  ONE MAGNIFICENT RAT, premium blue-gray, and at least twenty-five inches long, walked boldly into the center of Nonnie Swift’s cluttered living room, its near-metallic claws making a kind of snare drum beat on the parquet floor.

  “I started to call the ASPCA,” Nonnie whispered.

  “I’ll handle this mother,” I said.

  “Please be careful.”

  “Sure thing.” An old proverb crossed my mind: Bravery is a luxury; avoid it at all cost. “Take the gun,” I said to Nonnie.

  “Oh! Les . . .”

  “Take it.”

  A terrified Nonnie reached for the spear gun. “I’m praying as fast as I can, Lester Jefferson.”

  “This is gonna be child’s play,” I said. “Hell. I thought he’d come on like a tiger,” and just then, before I could get into a quarterback position, the rat bit my left big toe.

  “The sneaky son of a bitch,” I yelled, hopping on one foot.

  “Are you wounded?” Nonnie cried.

  “No. I got tough feet.”

  The rat moved back. He had a meek Quaker expression and the largest yellow-green eyes I’ve ever seen on a rat.

  “He’s the lily of the valley,” Nonnie said, foolishly, I thought.

  “Shut up,” I warned and knelt down and held out my hand. “Here, rattie, rattie,” I crooned. “Come here, you sweet little bastard. Let’s be pals.”

  “Call him Rasputin. They love that,” Nonnie advised.

  “Rasputin, baby. Don’t be shy. Let’s be pals, Rasputin.”

  Rasputin lowered his head and inched forward slowly.

  “That’s a good boy, Rasputin,” I said.

  And the little bugger grazed my hand lovingly. Rasputin’s fake chinchilla fur was warm, soft.

  “That’s a good little fellow,” I smiled sweetly and clamped my hands so hard around Rasputin’s throat that his yellow-green eyes popped out and rolled across the parquet like dice.

  “Oh, my gracious,” Nonnie exclaimed. “You killed him with your bare hands. Oh, my gracious!”

  “It was a fair fight.”

  “Yes, it was, Lester Jefferson. You killed the white bastard with your hands.”

  “Yeah. He’s a dead gray son of a bitch,” I said happily.

  “He’s a dead white son of a bitch,” Nonnie insisted. “White folks call you people coons, but never rat, ’cause that’s them.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a fact. I should know. They got plenty of rats in New Orleans. But none in the Garden District, where I was born.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “You never get too old to learn.” Seizing my rusty Boy Scout knife from my patched hip pocket, I began skinning Rasputin I. “Do you think the others will be afraid to come out because they smell the odor of death?” I said.

  A delighted cackle from Miss Swift. She lifted her skirt and displayed rosy, well-turned knees. “Let’m come. You can handle’m.”

  “You’re right for once.”

  Nonnie walked over to me, like a fifty-year-old cheerleader. She touched my shoulder lightly. “Your true glory has flowered,” she said. “Samson had his hair and, by god! you got your Wig.”

  Modesty forbade me to answer Miss Swift, but her voice rang sweetly in my ears. I would have kissed her, except my hands were soaked with blood.

  “Are you ready, warrior?”

  “At your service, Ma’am.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Nonnie said. “I’ll get the coal shovel and bang against the wall. Then I’ll close my eyes. I don’t want my baby to be born with the sign of a rat on him.”

  Waiting for Nonnie’s overture, I stood up and stretched. The blood had caked on my hands, making them itchy.

  “This is gonna be more fun than a parade,” Nonnie said. She spat on the coal shovel for luck.

  “I’m ready when you are,” I said, bracing my shoulders and sucking in my belly.

  “Here we go,” Nonnie cried, and banged the shovel against the wall three sharp whacks.

  Lord! Eight rats bred from the best American bloodlines (and one queer little mouse) jumped from holes in the chinoiserie panels. Nonnie had her eyes tight shut and was humming “Reach Out for Me.” Or were the rats humming? I couldn’t quite tell.

  Fearless, I didn’t move an inch. Images of heroes marched through my Wigged head. I would hold the line. I would prove that America was still a land of heroes.

  Widespread strong hands on taut hips, fuming, ready for action—I stomped my feet angrily. If I’d had a cape, I’d have waved it.

  The rats advanced with ferocious cunning.

  Perhaps for half a second, I trembled—slightly.

  With heavy heart and nothing else, Nonnie Swift prayed. Through the thin wall, I heard Mrs. Tucker wheeze a doubtful, “Amen.”

  Then, suddenly feeling a more than human strength (every muscle in my body rippled), I shouted, “All right, ya dirty rats!”

  My voice shook the room. Nonnie moaned, “Mercy on us.” I could hear Mrs. Tucker’s harvest hands applauding on the other side of the wall. The rats had stopped humming but c
ontinued to advance.

  And I went to meet them, quiet as Seconal (this was not the moment for histrionics)—it would have been foolhardy of me to croon, “Rasputin, old buddy.”

  Arms outstretched, the latest thing in human crosses, I tilted my chin, lifted my left leg, and paused.

  They came on at a slow pace, counting time. The mouse shrewdly remained near the wastebasket, just under the lavabo.

  “Yes!” Nonnie cried out.

  I didn’t answer. The rats had halted, a squad in V-formation. Connoisseurs of choice morsels—of babies’ satin cheeks, sucking thumbs, and tender colored buttocks—they neared the front for action.

  “Come a little closer,” I sneered.

  “Oh, oh,” Nonnie cried. “I can’t wait to tell him about this moment! I am a witness of the principality!”

  She was obviously nearly out of her mind, so I said only, “Patience, woman.”

  “Yes, my dear. But do hurry. He’s beginning to kick. We’re both excited.”

  I stood my ground. The rats seemed to be frozen in position, except for one glassy-eyed bastard, third from the end.

  He broke ranks and came to meet me.

  I flung my Dizzy Dean arms, made an effortless Jesse Owens leap, lunged like Johnny Unitas, and with my cleat-hard big toe kicked the rat clear across the room. He landed on Nonnie’s caved-in sofa.

  But I’ll hand it to the others: they were brave little buggers, brilliantly poised for attack.

  Strategy was extremely difficult. I had to map out a fast plan.

  “Les, Les . . . are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I breathed and started to close up ground.

  One rat, a second-stringer, made a leap but I crotched him with my right knee. He nose-dived, his skull going crack on the floor. Another zeroed in on that famed big toe, but I was ready for him too. Kicking wildly—because four were sneaking from the left flank—I could only knock him unconscious.

  Now the four and I waltzed. One-two-left. One-two-right. One-two-left, one-two-right. One-two-left, one-tworightone-twoleftonetwo—and then the biggest son of a bitch of all leaped as if he’d had airborne training.