What was ever going to satisfy her?
He lingered; waited until what he hoped was a decent time had elapsed—smiled, a third time, because the word “decent” had come into his mind—and then rose, brushed absently at the moist earth that clung to his trousers. He went to the car, walked round the front and opened the door at the driver’s seat as quietly as he could. It remained dark in the car, the dome light didn’t work, not even for Mina. He looked into the back. Coke Rymer lay squashed against the seat, already asleep and breathing heavily, wearily, through his gaped mouth. Mina lay on the outside, propped on her elbow, taking up most of the room. She wasn’t even disheveled. She regarded Peter with her pale, almost luminous eyes; spoke in a level, quiet—but not hushed—voice. “Well, did you have a nice walk?”
“It was all right,” he said. There was a glitter of petty triumph in his voice that he couldn’t keep out, and he hoped she wouldn’t notice it.
“Good for you,” she said. “Get some exercise, that’s the best way to get your strength back.”
He leaned in and began to crawl across the seat on his hands and knees. He wanted to have the steering wheel at his feet.
“You know,” she said, “it wouldn’t bother me none to turn old Coke out of the back seat here. He’s just going to sleep like a dead man. If you was to want to come back here and try your luck for a while, I’d roust him out.” Her voice was lazy and impassive, her eyes two gray patches. “You reckon you feel up to a little more exercise?”
All his little happiness melted away. “I’m afraid not,” he said.
She sniffed; sheer disdain. “I didn’t reckon you would.”
He lay down, then squirmed around to close the door; got his position back and lay there, sour and painful. He needed fiercely the pump handle, but he was determined he would not ask her for it. He lay awake, holding his genitals in his left hand. But sleep at last caught him, held him silent and dreamless and he woke into the daylight without rancor, feeling rested. But thirsted harshly for Mina’s dispensed alcohol.
In the early afternoon they came to Gordon, a town not different, so far as Peter could tell, from the scores of towns they had passed through. The surrounding countryside was flat, and on the easterly breeze was a whiff of brackishness; it couldn’t be many miles from the ocean side. Grass struggled to grow here, and the earth was often bare, a pinkish-white dust blanketed over packed burning clay. Here clay land was changing over into sandy land; the two soils melted together. The sunlight too seemed powdery, thick on the leaves of magnolia trees, collected in drifts like burning snow in the upper crevices of boxwood shrubs.
“Well, this here’s the town you wanted to get to,” Coke Rymer said. “Where do you want me to go from here?”
“Just drive us around a little and let me look,” Mina said. “I’ll let you know where I want you to stop.”
“Well, you’re the doctor.”
“That’s right,” she said.
The streets of Gordon were quiet. Cars were parked along each side of the main street, pocketed when it was possible in the shade of tall oak or magnolia trees. Grave-eyed negro children passed on the sidewalks, swinging wet bathing suits by their sides. The houses here were mostly white wooden houses of two storeys, but here and there were small brick duplexes with the silvered boxed air conditioners protruding from the less sunny windows. Through the main square of the town ran two railroad tracks, side by side, and the town was truly divided by them. On the east side of the tracks the moneyed houses began to grade finely down into grudging respectability and then at last into frank poverty. The asphalt pavement narrowed and was broken along the edges. Here were the one-storey white frame houses, held off the naked dusty yards by unpainted concrete blocks.
“You can turn here,” Mina said, and Coke Rymer obediently turned left into a red jolting dirt road. The sloping ditches were filled with black cinders, and the houses were no longer white, but stained brown or weathered gray. They were in a negro section, and there were no longer signs at the corners telling the names of the streets. Here the streets were nameless. There was an occasional shabby grocery store, its false brick siding plastered over with advertisements for soft drinks and headache powders.
“Right here, now,” she said, and he braked the car, let the motor idle. They had come out of the negro section into a beaten-down poor-white area. On the right was a squat white house, but Mina was observing the house on the left. It was small, looked as if it would contain four rooms or so; the rough oak siding was stained a dark brown, as dark almost as creosote, and the white trim was mostly battered away. The unfenced front yard was as bare and dusty as the others. The roof was gray galvanized tin, no different from the roof of Morgan’s house back in the mountains. Peter saw nothing interesting about the place. There were a hundred, a million others which would mirror it without a scrap of difference. … But it was what Mina wanted, what she must have been looking for.
“You can turn off the car,” she said. “This here’s the place we been looking for.”
He turned off the motor and they climbed out, leaned resting against the heated metal of the car.
“I don’t see what’s so wonderful about this place,” Coke Rymer said. “Who is it lives here, anyhow?”
“They don’t nobody live here,” she said. “This is where we’re going to live.”
The blond boy shrugged, sucked his front teeth. Peter was at first bewildered—it made no sense, none—but then he was grateful. They could move the stuff in the trunk of the car into the house, he would help move it, and then Mina would give him something to drink.
FOUR
When Peter woke, his gangly frame was shuddering all over, not just from the morning cool, but because this was the condition of his awaking body. He struggled with his limbs. The chains clashed and thumped on the splintery kitchen floor. He didn’t want to open his eyes. The early sunlight would strike like a bullet into his brain. The smell of slopped liquor, of chewed rancid scraps of food, hung in the room, only slightly freshened by the raw air that poured in. A window was broken or maybe somebody had left the door open. The light was on his eyelids, forming behind them a coarse abrasive red curtain which made his temples ache. An uncontrollable belch brought up the whole fetor of his gut and while he struggled to breathe, keeping his mouth open to dissipate the deathly taste, droplets of sweat popped out over his whole length, dampening his shirt and pants which were already salty and sour from the weeks before. He gasped.
Then he lay still, trying to listen, but all he could hear was his own thick choked breathing. When he held his breath he could hear only the blood swarming in his ears. But no one seemed to be awake but himself; he had to lie still. If he woke them, moving his chains loud enough to wake them, they would kick him to bits. He tried to place his head, without moving his arms and legs, so that the sun couldn’t get at his eyes. It was no good. The day had already begun its dreadful course, the sun was poisoning the sky. He felt the baleful rays sink into his pores. His spine felt as if metallic cold hands squeezed it intermittently. He couldn’t get his face out of the sunlight.
He lapsed into a fitful red doze, but was jarred awake by the fear of rattling the chains in his sleep. With her big mouth Mina would tear his Adam’s apple out of his throat. She would spit it on the floor and crush it with her big mean heel, like killing a cockroach. He could almost see her unmoving face hovering over his, feel the cold fishy breath of her; her teeth would be like hundreds of relentless needles. He whimpered helplessly, but stopped it off, constricting his throat like a ball of iron inside. If he began whimpering hard he couldn’t stop and it would get louder and louder until the moos came on him, and then they would beat him until he stopped. He stopped the whimper. His chest already felt jagged inside where they had kicked him. He fought to make all his muscles relax from the quivering, and stream on stream of tears rolled down his face. If he opened his eyes the tears would shoot sharp spears through them.<
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But he was so tired he was almost inanimate. He fell into a yellow sleep, bitter with a drilling electric sound and the smell of black mud and fish. He dreamed that he had no face at all and that his eyes were unseeing dark splotches on his gray stony back and that he swam forever through this world of solid objects which were to his body liquid. In the dream there was nothing he could touch, his body was mere extension without knowable presence.
Again he came awake, now with the black thirst upon him. The sunlight no longer filled his face, and yet he did not think that he had slept long. He felt a warm presence. At first his eyes wouldn’t open, and he thought that they had clicked them shut forever with locks and he thrashed around, beginning to whimper again, not caring about the chains now. He got his eyes open, though they were still unseeing, but it was hard to breathe. He blew his breath out hard and an inexplicable chicken feather blew up and stuck on his cheek. He gagged. Then when he could look it was all dim, but behind the dimness was a bright white ball with the hurt strained out of it.
He could not think any more. Everything in his head was gone. At last he realized he was looking at the sun. It shone through the dark gray cloth, reddening faintly the stretched muscles of the legs which arched over his face. He knew them already, Mina’s plump steady legs, taut curve at calf and thigh, arrogant, careless. He looked up the pink-tinged insides of her legs. He knew he had always been right. There at the X of here where her woman-thing ought to be was a spider as big as a hand, furred over with stiff belligerent hairs straight as spikes. He couldn’t stop looking. His gullet closed and his chest began to strain for air; he could hear it begin to crackle. His throat opened again, but it was hard to breathe because the whimpering had started. It started loud and he knew there was no hope stopping. The moos had got to come now; and then they would kick him to bits.
“Hush up, just hush up,” she said. “Can’t you never take a joke?” With the hand which wasn’t holding up the front of her skirt she reached down there and plucked the spider away. She held it free above him and though he could see it was only a toy, only wire and fuzz and springy legs, he couldn’t keep the whimpering back. It got louder; the moos had got to come.
She dropped her skirt and leaned her face over him, rolling it a little so that he could see she was disgusted. “Well there then,” she said. She shook the toy spider in her hand and then dropped it on his face.
He tried not to, he clenched his teeth and tried to keep it back, but the noiseless loud fear poured out of his mouth, moo after moo of it, pure craziness. He was so frightened he couldn’t hear himself, and he heard Mina calling:
“Coke! Coke! Come in here right now. Come in here.”
Before she had stopped shouting the watery blond boy came in. He didn’t even look at Mina but simply put the heel of his boot on Peter’s chest and ground his foot round and round, pushing down hard. The blond boy pushed harder until Peter couldn’t breathe any more, and he had to stop mooing. Then the boy squatted and sat on his chest, bouncing his weight up and down so that he couldn’t get out his fear. He drummed his arms and legs, banging the chain links, rubbing them across the floor.
The blond boy began to slap his face first with one hand and then with the other. “What’s my name?” he said.
“Coke.”
He slapped him again and again. “What’s the rest of it? What’s my full name?”
Peter was cold with unknowing. He formed sounds but no name emerged from them.
“Come on, baby. Stick with it. What’s my full name, now?” The slapping had got progressively harder.
“Coke Rymer,” he said.
“That’s my baby,” the blond boy said in a soothing tone of voice. “That’s a way to go.” He stood up with the meaningless nonchalance he always had about him. “We’ll get you a drink now, okay?” Without pausing for an answer he kicked Peter hard on the side of his neck. “That’s a baby,” he said.
He groaned at the kick, but after the first uttering of pain was out he subsided into the whimpering which finally became only a strained silent heaving of his chest. He kept looking up at Coke’s liquescent blue gaze; his own eyes were charged with pain and fear but not with hate. He would never have any more hate.
Apparently satisfied, Coke Rymer knelt and began to unlock the chained cuffs at his wrists and ankles. He was still murmuring soothingly. “All right now, you’re coming right along. You’re going to do all right, honey, you’re going to do all right.” When he finished with the locks he handed the bunch of keys on the long chain to Mina. She dropped the chain loop over her head, tucked the keys into her cotton blouse and buttoned it up. She stood away from the two of them, her arms folded. Coke Rymer hoisted him to his feet and held him up until he seemed steady enough to stand by himself. He stood wavering, his head dropped almost to his chest and lolling back and forth; floundered across the room and leaned backward against the flimsy dinette table. He stroked carefully at his wrists; there were scarlet ichorous bands on them where the broad iron cuffs had rubbed the skin away. It made him feel very pitying to see his poor wrists like this.
“Huh,” Mina said. “You ain’t hurt. That’s nothing.”
“We’ll get him a drink of liquor,” Coke Rymer said. “That’ll fix our little honeybunch up before you know it. Make a new man out of him.” He swung open one of the rickety wall cupboard doors. Inside, it was full of empty bottles and broken glass. He brought down a pint bottle of murky stuff and shook it, looked at it against the broad light that streamed through the open door. “What’ll you give me for this?” he said. He showed his dim little teeth in a stretched smile.
He could barely grunt. It sounded like gravel rattling in a box.
“Oh, go on and give it to him,” Mina said. She watched him patiently, as if she was curious. Of course curiosity would never show in that locked face.
The boy held it out to him and he waited a wary moment to see if it would be jerked away. He got hold of it in both hands and then momentarily just stood clutching it out of fear of dropping or spilling it. He drank in short convulsive swallows. It tasted thick and mushy and warm, but it had a burning around the edges. As he lowered the bottle he lowered his head too and then again he stood clenching the bottle and, with the muscles of his chest, clenching his insides too. He had to keep it down, couldn’t let it get away from him; he stood taut from his heels to his chin. After a long time the writhing spasms stopped. Again sweat came out on him all over.
Mina was still watching him. She spoke in an observing even tone: “They’s chicken blood in that liquor.”
He was still stuporous; her face was as blank to him as paper.
“You was the one done it yourself,” she said. “You was the one pulled that chicken’s head off and crammed that neck down in the bottle. I guess you didn’t know it, but that’s what you done. It was just last night.” In the morning sunlight her eyes seemed paler than ever.
Coke Rymer sniggered.
He looked clumsily at the bottle in his hands, then put it carefully on the table. He was a long way past caring now. He stood still, waiting and dazed.
She stirred her feet and began talking to the blond boy. She had the full relaxed air of someone who has just seen a difficult juggling trick performed successfully. “Me and the girls has got to go off,” she said. “I got to get me something to wear for tonight. You better keep your eye on him good while we’re gone and see he gets this place cleaned up some. Don’t let him drink too much of that liquor so he can’t do nothing. You better get him something to eat at dinnertime too. We got to make him eat something.”
His mind was clearing some. The narrow avenues of what he knew of his labors and his fear had emerged a little from the wet smoke. He understood that she was talking about him but that he didn’t have to listen. And then he had to. She was telling him something. “Go on in there and wake them girls up,” she said. “We got to get going.”
“Wait a minute,” Coke Rymer said. He
turned to her. “I want to show him something.” He came across to where Peter stood and spread his hand flat on the table, his fingers wide apart. “Look here,” he said, “I want to show you something.” He fetched a big folded knife from his pocket and let it roll in his hand. When he moved his thumb a sharp crying blade jumped from his fist, circled in the air. Peter moved back a little, trembling. The knife was Coke Rymer’s man-thing, he didn’t want it to hurt him; he didn’t want to see it. Coke Rymer laid it on the table and twirled it around with his index finger. He was giggling. He picked the knife up at the end of the blade, pinching it with his thumb and forefinger. “Look at this,” he said. He hesitated and then flipped the knife quickly upward. It spun round and round, a flashing pinwheel. When it came down the blade chucked into the tabletop in the space between the third and fourth fingers of Coke Rymer’s left hand. He giggled. The knife quivered to stillness.
“That’s enough of that stuff now,” Mina said. “I want him to get some things done today. I don’t want you messing around and playing with him all the time. He’s got to get some things done.”
Coke Rymer folded the knife and put it away. He turned toward her. “You want me to take away that old pump handle?”
“I reckon not. You just quit deviling him and leave him alone. He’s enough trouble the way he is already, without you picking at him.”
“I wasn’t hurting him none.”
“Just leave him alone, I said.” She spoke to Peter. “I thought I told you already to get them girls out of bed. I ain’t got all day to fool around with you.”
He slouched forward, going reluctantly toward the bedroom. He wanted her to make sure the yellow-haired boy wouldn’t disturb the pump handle. She ought to stop him. The pump handle solaced him with its length and its fine heaviness in his hand; he loved to stroke along the long subtle curve of it; he liked just to have it near him, to hold it out before himself, admiring its blazing shininess and its heft. Hours and hours he had spent scrubbing and shining and oiling it. He knew that Mina derived a clear satisfaction from knowing that it was his man-thing, and he thought she ought not let Coke Rymer dally with it.—He couldn’t understand the blond boy. There was nothing in him, nothing at all; he didn’t understand why Mina tolerated him.
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