It was just a child’s notion, and by the summer that Harry came to be with us I wasn’t a child anymore and not a man either. If I remembered that idea at all it was something to laugh at. Still, like all the other cockeyed, cross-eyed visions from the knee-high world of children, it had some truth in its distortion.
Not a child anymore and not yet a man. In the fall I would be sent back, according to the family custom still followed by those who could afford it, to military school. In that curious cold greenhouse the flowering from boy to man was supposed to be accomplished. I wasn’t happy about it. I had been there. Suffered and survived. Conformed and thus gained some freedom. At least that was one lesson from the world of men, though you either learned it by accident, tripped over the truth as you might bump into and fall over a piece of furniture in the dark, but known room. Or else you were hurt and broken. What happened was that you stifled your impulse to rebel and followed an urge to conform. Very slowly it dawned on you that you were now anonymous. Nobody knew who you really were. You were just another pale-faced, gray-uniformed body passing up and down the cold stone halls of the barracks named for an Episcopal bishop, standing in ranks, marching on the parade ground, or sitting in a classroom with your compass and sharp pencil trying to prove that Euclid was right. Meanwhile you, the real you, were far away and somewhere else. You pushed the flesh and bones that bore your name through a thousand motions and activities every day. In a while these became routine and habit, and you could prod yourself along, all the separate and integral parts, careless and thoughtless as a shepherd with a flock of calm sheep grazing. You were free as a bird or a beast. The rebels charged windmills, battered at closed doors and high walls with their bare heads and were always bloodied and always finally bowed. You never had to bow. Of course your body did obeisance to custom and ceremony. But while your flesh knelt before some honored institution your spirit was dancing jigs and hornpipes and thumbing its nose at everything under the sun.
There was another lesson to be learned, not yet but soon after, as inevitable and abstract as those theorems and corollaries of Euclid: that all the other survivors were doing exactly the same thing. That would be a chilly realization when you knew that all the others, like yourself, were ghosts in the flesh, countries, counties and continents populated by gray ghosts while, invisible, the world of spirits was a tumultuous chaos. Then you’d have to learn to live with that too.
But none of these things was much on my mind when Harry came to stay with us. I just thought that it would be good to have him around and show him things. I envied and admired him by that time. He had grown tall and slender and handsome. Everyone said he looked Spanish (the last of the Spanish blood in our family) and all agreed he was the best-looking one in the whole family. He had his own car he had put together out of old parts from a junkyard, and he drove it down. (I still had a bike.) He brought guns and all kinds of fishing tackle with him. Up in his part of the state there was still lots of wild, wide open country, and he had spent most of his spare time in the woods. When he arrived, I helped him unload the car and carry all the stuff in the house and up to his room on the second floor. My father greeted him on the front porch and saw the rifles and the shotgun, and he didn’t say anything but welcome.
When we got everything up to his room, Harry piled it all in a corner and flopped down on the big double bed and smoked. (I wasn’t allowed to smoke yet.)
“Daddy must like you a lot,” I said.
“How come?”
“He doesn’t allow any guns in the house. But he didn’t say a word when he saw yours.”
Harry laughed. “He doesn’t care. He just feels superior and doesn’t care.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Or,” Harry went on, ignoring my idea, “maybe he just feels sorry for me. It’s exactly the same thing as feeling superior.”
“I just think he wants you to feel at home.”
“Well, it’s a good thing,” Harry said. “If he said anything about my guns I would’ve turned right around and hopped in the car and left.”
“Where would you go to?”
Everything I said seemed to tickle Harry.
“Somewhere. Oh, I’d go somewhere,” he said. He bounced up and down on the bed and then turned over on his stomach. “You know? I think I’m going to like it here. This has got my room at home beat a mile.”
We were off for a summer of it, it seemed. Harry had lots of tales and plots and plans and ideas. Harry was bored and restless, fidgety and as calm as a stone in the sun at the same time. Harry had caught tarpon all by himself off the East Coast, and he had killed more than one buck in the woods. He was a strange and wonderful kind of blood kin to have. He could make you want to show him everything you cared about, and as you were showing it to him you knew all the time he’d be scornful and either by laughter or silence make you ashamed of it and yourself. Beautiful things could turn shoddy from one of his skeptical glances. He could laugh about anything. He even got the giggles when we went to St. Luke’s Cathedral for Holy Communion. He held it all back while we were still kneeling at the altar, but when we went out the side door to go back to our pew, he ducked in the dark little room where they keep vestments for the acolytes and started to laugh.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I got to thinking that’s probably the only way I’ll get a drink the whole time I’m here.”
“That’s sacrilegious.”
“So what?”
Harry was brave, there was no doubt about that. He would take any kind of a dare my friends and I could come up with. He dived off the top of a high light-pole at Rock Springs and somehow he didn’t break his neck. He drove his car wide open up and down the main drag through all the red lights and the cops couldn’t catch him. (Not then, anyway. They knew whose car it was all right.) He did whatever he felt like whenever he felt like it.
He used to talk a lot about wanting to be in the Army. The real Army. He scorned military school.
“I’ll be glad when I can get in,” he said. “I know everything there is about guns and I can really shoot a rifle.”
The proof of that was that whenever he felt cranky and like being alone, he’d go down to the lake at the end of the street and shoot snapping turtles. When they poked their little black heads above the surface he’d fire a shot and hit one most every time.
I thought it was fun to have him around.
That same summer Joe Childs came back from reform school. He was a lot older than we were, but he had been in the same grade with me all through the public schools until I went away to military school and he got sent off to the reform school at Raiford for trying to set fire to somebody’s house. He was one of the barefooted, shambling, overage, shaggy-haired, snaggle-toothed, dull-eyed cracker boys who always came to school in overalls and never took a bath. They brought their lunch in paper bags and ate outside under the trees by themselves instead of in the lunchroom where everybody else ate. Cornbread usually. They bullied everybody else, carried knives, were cruel to Negroes, cripples, stray dogs, and old maids. They smoked in the latrines. When they got caught at it the Principal beat them on the bare skin with a piece of rubber hose. But they were famous for never hollering or breaking into tears.
“Him? I don’t pay him no nevermind. My old man draws blood when he swings a strap.”
Joe Childs was big and ugly and slow-witted. He had a lazy yellow smile all the time, but he could be cruel. When we were still in grammar school and his age and size made a lot more difference, he used to make some of us bring him a meat sandwich every day. If we didn’t, he beat us up. I used to beg my mother and Edna, the cook, for a meat sandwich. If they wouldn’t make one for me I’d either have to play hookey that day or take a beating. I’d go dragging to school with my heart in my throat like a wad of sour grease and my feet like two heavy lead weights. It was hard to go ahead and go when you knew you were bound to take a beating.
> Finally, after a long time of it, I broke down and told them why I had to have a meat sandwich every day.
My mother was really angry and all for telling the Principal, but the funny thing was that my father didn’t get mad at all.
“That poor boy hasn’t got anybody looking after him,” he said. “Tell Edna to fix an extra meat sandwich every morning.”
I’ll never know, I guess, whether that was the right thing or not, or whether that was just feeling superior and sorry at the same time the way Harry said. At the time, anyway, it was a great relief. My father carefully explained to me that Joe Childs’s father was a veteran of the First World War. He had been gassed and he couldn’t do much work anymore. His wife had run away and disappeared when Joe was still a baby. He drank a lot.
When Joe Childs got back from reform school, or anyway the first we knew about, it was on a day when some of us were out at the Old Fairgrounds playing ball. (Harry didn’t come with us. He couldn’t see any point in games.) Joe Childs came running up out of a pit they had dug there years before, before the Depression, to put in a big municipal swimming pool. All they did was dig a hole in the ground. There were two other guys running along with Joe Childs. There were five of us, and I was standing with my back to the bushes around the pit knocking flies out to the others. I heard somebody or something thrashing in the bushes behind me and I twisted around to see what it was. And there stood Joe Childs, smiling that lazy yellow smile, and there were the two others, strangers to the town as far as I knew, on either side of him.
“Chunk me the ball.” That was the first thing he said.
I threw it to him and he bounced it in his palm a few times and then put it in his pocket.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take the bat too.”
I wasn’t going to give him the bat even if it meant a fight. He was big, but we had them five to three, and the other guys had run in from the field and gathered around me.
“Don’t you hear me, boy?”
I put the bat in my hands like a club.
“You’ll have to take it if you want it.”
All three of them reached in their pockets at one time and came up with big, long-bladed jackknives. I had had knives pulled on me before, and I was scared as soon as the sunlight hit the open blades and glanced off them. All of them grinned at our surprise.
“Go on and give him the bat.”
I handed it to him and he pushed me down.
“We don’t want no kids from town coming out here and playing ball,” he said. “You come out here again and we’ll cut you wide open. Get!”
We turned around and started to walk across the field to where our bikes were parked, downcast and mad.
“Run, goddamn you! Run!”
And we ran all the way to our bikes, hopped on, and pedaled away for all we were worth until we were out of sight.
I told Harry all about it that evening.
“You just let them walk over you like that?”
“What else could we do?”
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” he said. “You get another bat and a ball from somewhere and go back out there tomorrow afternoon.”
“We couldn’t do that.”
“Don’t worry,” Harry said, laughing. “I’ll come along too. Let’s see if they’ll try and pull a knife on me.”
The next afternoon we all piled into Harry’s car and drove out to the lonely Old Fairgrounds. We started to play ball in the same spot. We played a little while, so tense and waiting for what we knew was going to happen that we could hardly catch or hit the ball. Pretty soon, sure enough, the three of them came running out of the pit, blundering through the bushes like runaway animals. This time they had their knives out already.
“I thought I done told you all,” Joe Childs said. He was red in the face he was so mad.
Harry came walking straight toward the three of them.
“What’s the matter with you, waterhead?”
That made Joe Childs even madder. He did have a big head. He started for Harry, but before he could even move a couple of steps Harry calmly reached in his pocket and took out a little pistol. I didn’t even know he had it with him. No wonder he was so sure of himself. He didn’t wait or just wave it around either. When he pulled it out he shot—WHAM! (Every one of us jumped!)—about an inch or so in front of Joe Childs’s bare foot. The three of them stopped like somebody had jerked them backwards on a leash. Joe Childs turned as pale as the belly of a catfish. One of his buddies broke out in a sweat all over and the other one wet his pants.
“Throw down them knives.”
They dropped them in the grass.
“Okay,” Harry said. “Let’s all go down in the pit.”
We picked up the knives and followed behind him. He marched them down in the pit and made them line up in a row with their hands up in the air. Just like the movies. We saw that they had built themselves a lean- to shack down there, and there were cans and bottles all around. They must have been living there.
“You know what you are?” Harry said.
They didn’t say anything. The one who had wet his pants shook his head, but none of them said a thing.
“You’re trash, white trash,” he said. “I’d just as soon shoot you as not. Understand that?”
They all nodded.
“Now,” he said. “All together—We’re trash! We’re trash! We’re trash!”
They stood in front of him with their hands in the air and shouted over and over again that they were trash until Harry got tired of laughing and listening to them. He grabbed hold of my arm and pushed me right in front of Joe Childs.
“All right,” he said. “Hit him.”
I had been raised never to hit anyone first and especially somebody who couldn’t hit you back. I couldn’t do it. But Harry kept yelling in my ear until I finally hit him in the face.
“Hit him! I didn’t say tap him. Hit him!”
I hit him a little harder. Joe Childs shook his head and had to spit blood on the ground. Harry kept on nagging me until I hit the other two. The last I really teed off on and he sat down. One by one we had to hit them, and after the first go-around we began to get in the mood for it. Then we were possessed by it. Round and around we went, hitting them until their faces were all cut and bruised and bloody, and they were begging for us to quit. When they wouldn’t get up off the ground to be hit: again we kicked them until they would. We hit them until our hands hurt. When their faces got too bad we started to hit them in the stomach and the ribs. They got sick all over the ground and cried like babies.
In the end, once we had really got going, Harry had a hard time stopping us. They just lay on the ground and moaned. The strange thing was that all of us, who hadn’t even dreamed of doing anything like that before, felt wild and exhilarated and good about it.
Harry kicked the lean- to over and we jumped up and down on it and smashed it to pieces. Then we piled everything they had on top of it and stuffed magazines and paper in wads underneath.
“You,” Harry said to Joe Childs, prodding him with the point of his shoe. “Get up.”
He struggled to his feet and moaned. He staggered and looked like a dog trying to walk on its hind legs and we laughed at him.
“You’re the one that plays with fire, ain’t you?”
He kept both hands over his face and mumbled something.
Harry gave him a pack of matches and told him to start a fire. He knelt with trembling fingers and touched a match to the wadded paper. It caught and the dry wood caught, too, and then there was a good crackling fire. After everything was burning good he made them empty their pockets and throw everything on the fire. Then we took them out of the pit and made them run, across the Fairgrounds and away from town. They were weak, running and falling down. We yelled and hooted after them, and Harry shot at them a couple of times, just over their heads. They picked up a great burst of speed when he did that, and we got to laughing so hard we fell on the ground and ro
lled over and over.
Then we climbed in Harry’s car and drove it as fast as it would go, wildly, out in the country and all over the county. We laughed and sang and joked. It was like being drunk.
It was only late that night when I was alone in my room trying to get to sleep that I started to feel bad. I got up and went down the hall to Harry’s room and woke him up to talk about it. He sat right up when I touched him, switched on the bedside light and smoked and listened to me. He laughed at my doubts and shame.
“They asked for it, didn’t they, pulling knives on you like that?”
“Sure,” I said. “It isn’t that simple, though. It isn’t that I feel sorry for them or anything. They probably would do the same to us if they could. It’s just I didn’t know I had it in me to do like that.”
The answer he gave me has stuck, because, in a curious way, in the next years the whole wide world seemed to be asking itself the same question and getting the same answer. And once tasted, that doubt and shame is with you, on your tongue always. Harry puffed his cigarette and looked at me. For once he wasn’t smiling.
Evening Performance Page 37