George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  The intimates—inmates of intimacy—rested until an orange moon yellowed toward white; then, they left. Purity’s almost blissful perfume mingled with the salt-and-grease smell of fish ’n’ chips up by the Commons. Drunks lounged and slept on the grass as if it were a divan. The night was sable indigo; their shadows moved black under streetlamps bent over them like sodomite monks.

  Rue dreamt of how nice it’d be to smash flies’ soft bodies against Purity’s hard, sober whiteness, to make it darker, softer. He wondered if Purity, plastered with hundreds of corpses of smeared flies, might seem delectably darker. He dreamt of the little ivory tub she liked to wash her little ivory sex in, while sitting in the lascivious posture of a cedilla. Silk rippling black down white legs.

  In Purity’s eyes, Rue’s a kind of crow, raven, vulture, vampire, as black as rat’s fur. He could half play the piano and pretend to play the rest. When he was in her, in her bed, the air they breathed was like sticky slime.

  They were lying in bed, joined at their hips, on the always-seditious Dominion Day night, with fireworks fluting and bursting seditiously over the usually blacked-out wartime city, when Purity joked about a comical fella who’d tried to get her to carry his child. “His name was Asa. He look like you.”

  With dreadful ice in his heart, Rue knew he was embedded in Asa’s whore. He drilled deeper, harder. Having her was like having revenge, and having it blisteringly cold. He heard Asa giggling in the shadows. He pulled out of Purity’s lap, then hit her. Once, twice, thrice.

  Three slaps to get blood oozing from her lips, and she was yelling, “Blackbastardfuckinblackbastard.” Rue swore he’d bash Purity until she was his colour. He grabbed his belt out his pants. He was gonna whip impure Purity with the silver buckle Easter’d given him. Purity hollered, and Googie burst in: the glass of the door broke in a star-shape. He slugged hard; his fists struck oil with each connection; Rue folded onto the Turkish carpet.

  Googie loathed commotion and upset—and he hated Rue’s unfunky jazz: music should doctor, not need one. Haps Rue forgot he was only a half-ass hayseed, only half a pianist, and a dime-a-dozen. Ergo, the sucker’d have to square up, clear out, pronto. Rue’d get a few bucks, and then the door. Googie couldn’t abide no nigger ignoramus!

  XI

  AFTER Easter’d drowned, Rufus was impossible to endure. To George, it seemed his family was just mortally bad news. To stick with Rue could mean, then, his own doom. It was time to escape. Georgie knew there was about a hundred dollars of insurance money in the shack; he’d torch the shack, collect the moolah, split it, bill for bill, with Rue, and they’d skedaddle different routes. He set the fire, saw Cynthy’s photo blaze, got the cash, gave Rue almost half.

  Georgie left Three Mile Plains but chose to stay in Windsor because he liked country life. He did odd jobs for Pius Bezanson, a farmer, for ten bucks a month. Not sour pay, compared with bitter poverty. Bezanson’s belief was, “Let every man turn pain into bread.” Bezanson let George bunk in the barn, where he managed to snore despite stench and noisy, beastly copulations of animals. Mosquitoes were also wicked, stabbin George relentlessly. Even so, Georgie felt he’d do better, by and by. Hope was as striking as lightning, as deep as water, water, water, and as dream-productive as rum.

  Farmin was natural for Georgie, and Bezanson let him eat and eat. Once, the farmer paid Georgie with a seven-pound tin of blueberry jam, seven loaves of bread, and seven quarts of rum. Georgie made rum and jam sandwiches. Some good under crow-fractured, dark-blue Heaven. He had to wade through bushes, spend days cutting poplar trees and maples and spruce and pine. He could milk cows, churn cream, set out eggs delicate, delicate. He’d lead oxen—and, times, get bogged down in mud. He could tiptoe through the marsh bushes, the thinner woods near the Avon River, tumble into orange-red mud and climb out, or quickly skinny-dip in the river. He’d wander, separate, alone, among lichened rocks, let salt spray off the Fundy splash his Coloured Nova Scotian face. He’d take barrels and haul apples out the trees. He could drink fresh water by scooping up rain. A downy rain could make even October taste as fresh as April. After trainloads of apples, after muddy roads.

  He’d found Paradise. Now he needed a woman.

  From this farm at Windsor’s edge, George eyed, daily, passing, dairy girls, lasses only thirteen or twelve, perched upright, like postage stamp queens, atop small, slow Percherons. The girls’d titter, chatter, sing. Jostling, their dairy pails pinged, as jittery as kindling breaking into flame. The dames gleamed unusually beautiful; their Madonna-like smiles as gay as fresh milk. George watched em giggle, shout, sing, as they’d pass by him on the Orotava Road. He juggled blue plums to entice their eyes. They’d look back, teehee, and he felt gratified. He noticed Blondola—one of the solar-eclipsing Plains belles (from Englishman River Falls)—noticing him. Georgie chase her small horse and hand her a blue plum. Blondola smiled, and he felt melted. She was like a fat, plush mare. The pretty women’d rub berry juice on their lips. Blondola too. The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Blondola was thirteen, but plump, bodacious. A lively-lookin, dark-skinned black girl in black. Her face was chocolate smooth, with supremely plush, violet lips. Her coal-coloured eyes were lit up as if by an internal night of stars. Just her “Hi,” the way she’d say it, ‘d jolt Georgie’s heart. Maybe they’d be so much in love that, making love, they’d feel like they were equally his and hers, that one set of hands was as dependable as the other. Ah, that chocolate-dark, chocolate-sweet woman, her plum-tint eyes!

  The road is all dirt—dirty,

  My gal is all pert—-pretty.

  Blondola was authoritatively everything Georgie wanted: her deep laughter reminded him of the scary gaiety of Cynthy’s laughter when she was sweaty-happy with Asa.

  Georgie study Blondola close.

  He ask, “How ya get that name, Blondola? Ya a secret movie star?”

  She be bashful: “Nah, Ma’s name be Cassie and ma aunt’s Ann, so my middle name’s Cassandra.”

  Georgie get avid: “And Blondola?” Blondola just laugh and go on her way, gigglin with the other maids. They tease Georgie fierce.

  One joked, “Men peacocks are more colourful than girl ones.”

  Blondola yelled, “If only it were like that with our men!”

  Blondola looked a super good woman, with her plaid lumberjack shirts and jackets, her stories based on recipes, her country blues radio curing tobacco. She was partial to a house with sun in the living room and smelts drying on the roof; to a dunga-reed Romeo. Like everybody in Three Mile Plains, she’d grown up with blues gossip bout lethal booze; bout buttoned-down, open-flied preachers; bout leathered-down cowboys mangled by gypsum-mine dynamite. She’d be happy to go along with a man, a man goin somewhere, somewhere far.

  Courtin Blondola should’ve been easy for Georgie. She liked his drawl, his laugh, his fearless—and sober—hard work. But he was hindered in his interest because he had no place to bring Blondola. The big drafty, stinky barn he slept in was no site for wooin a swell young gal makin dove’s eyes at him. Georgie’d’ve to pull down better than ten bucks a month to be an effective Casanova.

  He found a dream solution. He saw a newsreel about khaki-clad Canucks crossin the Atlantic to cross swords with Hitler, boys clearly no taller, bigger, or older than him. They appeared on the movie screen, silvery and sunny, smokin on the Halifax docks, waitin to board ships, and kissin on two delicious gals each. All Georgie knew of war was what funny books showed: a lot of rat-a-tat-tat and pow and splat and whammy. But maybe he could ship overseas, kill a clutch of Krauts, bulk up into a he-man, lift gold rings off married corpses, juxx some British quim, then return, swaggering, and marry Blondola with much hoopla—with their wedding pix in the Hants County Register. He’d seize his future this way.

  So George told Blondola he was goin to the Boches-Hun War, and he ask, “Will ya wait for me?” He’d enlist, return, keep her glad. Blondola was playful, gleeful, but found Georgie spellbindingly earnest. She nodded
; they kissed.

  XII

  EIGHTEEN now, George didn’t have to lie about his age to get into the Canadian Active Army, but still he ask a black woman—Naomi Jones, who was as blind as water—to go to the recruiters and claim to be his mother and vouch for his age. George told recruiters he was born in the United States, Massachusetts, Boston. (Because Naomi knew about Georgie’s sorry childhood, she never interrupted with any truth.)

  So George pressed himself on the service and—after he was stripped and checked for lice—got pressed into service at once, peelin tatoes, slingin hash, scourin honey buckets. Yessum, he then wondered if he’d die like Cynthy, scrubbing latrines. The valiant cook and heroic janitor endured the rigmarole of “bastard training” up in Sorel, P.Q. (by the Historic Murder Site of Kamouraska), where Frenchies dubbed him Joe Louie, and he’d have to cook em all hash after, like them, he’d run five miles (fully geared up), crawled through mud, hurled himself past barbed-wire barricades, and dug foxholes. But white boys got to play cards and harmonica after; the Indian and the Coloured, well, they still had to fry eggs and swab barracks. Still, though George was Grade-A Infantry meat, when all his comrades got shipped out—to slog up and through Italy and hand out maple syrup as well as copies of Anne of Green Gables in Italian—George’s name weren’t in that number. No, his weapons would be a mop, a broom, a paring knife. Georgie hated “blaytent prejadis,” so he walk away from Camp No. 45, went AWOL. He still wanted, somehow, to be a notched-gun hero, not a potato peeler.

  Georgie boarded a train to Montreal, Cynthy’s fabled city. After ogling the glorious Sepia Showgirls (some looked hauntingly like his ma) and gobbling smoked meat on rye with a dill pickle, he bought a black-market registration card for five dollars and signed up with the Merchant Marine as Cliff Croxen.

  The ship he engaged with, in August 1944, was the S.S. Karma owned by Newton and Tuttles out of Yorkshire, Hull, England. His job was to stoke the boilers. To shovel coal. That was all, but he was still literally going somewhere. Aboard this seemingly divinely shielded vessel, George even got to see Siberia, voyaging through the icefields thereabouts very, very slowly, while serenading his buddies on his Dante harmonica. But when he was in London, the “Ol’ Country,” between the ale and the strippers, he never saw sweet fuck-all. But it was good, it was jolly cheerio splendid, to inhale British exhaust and hear pub Billingsgate on the Kraut-cratered, bomb-blasted streets. Best thing was fish ’n’ chips, wet, moist, tangy with salt and vinegar, with brown ale that tasted like a cross between vinegar and molasses. A scuffle in a pub got Georgie skirmishin with bobbies, and he got tossed in jail for a week. Visited by the Sally Ann, he spent his time toying with The Scofield Reference Bible, while dreaming of playing with a Scofield gun.

  Georgie never see any direct action. Closest he got was on the high ocean, crossing water way too heavy to be sky, way too light to be land, his skin reflecting the iridescent Atlantic. The first time he crossed the North Atlantic, he saw waves ten storeys high and could hold nothing in his stomach, and it was only vomit, vomit, vomit, for three unholy days. When he got used to the thunderous heaving of the Atlantic, he viewed three scrap-metal reefs of bursting, burning ships, and blazing sailors, some of them jumping into an ocean surfaced by flames. It was horrible: the screams of the cremating; the moans of the drowning. A sinking ship was a big mass grave dug by a torpedo. After those banshee detonations, bits of jumbled crews would bob in the water: a hand, a torso, a head and part of a shoulder. Water resembled a huge mess of half-digested meals. Corpses’d litter a midnight sea. Some would float into port, all the way back to Halifax, arriving, stately, as truncated, battered logs. Dispirited, brine-sodden, skeletal.

  Once, Georgie saw shrapnel hit a shipmate. The sailor’s skull opened like a watermelon. His shocked eyes popped out like corks. He couldn’t believe he was dead. He laughed: that’s when the blood came out in a rush and he fell smack overboard. One of ten thousand heroes buried in water.

  When the Europe War shut down, George exited the Merchant Marine. He was paid three hundred bucks and discharged. But as soon as he came ashore, George was arrested by military police from the no-longer-zombified Canadian Army and, treated as a deserter, was tossed in the brig. He sat there for twenty-eight days while the army evaluated his faculties and the facts. He’d been a deserter for over two hundred days. What was his fucking problem, exactly? First, he was “Colored” or “Dark” (“Complexion”) with “Brown Eyes” and “Black Hair” and holding the “Trade” of “Heavy Labourer,” whose official function in His Majesty’s Canadian Army was only as “General Duty.” He also had a “tattoo right forearm ins. G.H.” that he’d picked up in London. He also claimed incredibly to have travelled to South America, North Africa, England, and Siberia, and that the S.S. Karma’d been bombed twice. (“No record of any such blasted incidents.”)

  Jaundiced, the army decided to fire a “negro” who wouldn’t mop floors or crack eggs without whining. So George’s conduct was summed up as “Bad,” and he was discharged on a “10-29-10” (R.O. 1029 [10]), meaning he was “Unable to meet the required military physical standards” and was “Unlikely to become an efficient soldier.” Medically speaking, George seemed fine. The army doc deemed him a “young negro well developed and nourished and talkative, loquacious, cheerful, and friendly,” with only a few carious teeth, no scoliosis in his spine, no local tenderness or weird masses in his stomach, and no murmurs in his heart, and with symmetrical lungs, a normal pharynx and tonsils, and a regular pulse.

  But the army shrink specified that George had a “Psychopathic Personality” with “a negative attitude toward the army,” that he complained often of headaches, that he’d had chicken pox in childhood, and that he’d been tossed into detention for two days in Sorel, P.Q., because of robbery: “he stole money from a Cpl. Belliveau, contrary to military law.” George was also of “doubtful stability,” showed “undisciplined behaviour,” had a record of “tremendous job shifting, doing odd jobs everywhere on farm and in the bush,” expressed “a lack of grit-guts,” swore to “some trouble with army policy for little trouble,” and, lying, said, “I never drink. Never smoke.” In total, G.H. was a “childish negro, an unhappy man who cannot get along with other people.” True: he was an “inadequate liar” whose “affirmations often appear unbelievable.” Asked if he had any complaint about his medical dossier, George wrote, “Nothing.” Georgie signed off on his receipt of “all my Pay, Allowances, and Clothing,” and then Private G. A. Hamilton, once of the No. 6 District Depot, either in Halifax, N.S., or in the Cape Breton Highlander Reserve, was dismissed. At-ten-shun!

  XIII

  THE ARMY head shrink had recommended Hamilton return to the Merchant Marine because that would “satisfy your impulsive adventuresome temperament” or, if not that, do “heavy outdoor labour under supervision.” But Georgie recollected Montreal as the last place he’d been borderline happy before joining the Murder Marine. He also wanted, desperately, to collect some collateral before wooing Blondola again and wedding her now.

  So Georgie boarded the Ocean Limited and clickety-clacked northwest to that Paris of the Saint Lawrence: Montreal. That ex-fur-trade, beaver-pelt metropolis boasted Coloured bars, Coloured dancers, brown-sugar beauties, and brown-sugar dandies. Strolling Sainte-Catherine Street at night was like promenading an avenue of tinfoil and diamonds. Georgie enjoyed peeking inside theatrical clubs that were hot-pink and basic-black boxes, featuring “exotic” lovelies—spun-candy fancies—from the Quebec heartland who hoped to be discovered and delivered to sophisticated, vulgar Hollywood but who usually got discovered in someone’s husband’s arms and then delivered to a hospital on a stretcher. Georgie figured his army service, though spent in the brig, could gain him a bouncer post, even if he was more suited for pitching hay than he was for pitching drunkards.

  After a week of ambling Montreal’s steep streets, eating the usual smoked meat sandwiches with garnishes of dill pickle, with nightly adventures
among the willing dancers, George got himself a nightclub job, Rue-like, at Le Sphinx. His position was not front-line, however. The white male clientele would not tolerate a Coloured bouncer but could not object to a Coloured dishwasher. Here George’s army service helped him spectacularly: he had rare experience in washing dishes, glasses, cutlery, and so he reddened his tan hands in scalding, foaming water while scouring beer, wine, and martini glasses mainly. (Almost nobody ate anything on the night shifts.) One fringe pleasure for Georgie was getting to hear musicians playing their striptease music and getting to hear raucous men’s dirty encouragements, voiced in French and English, to their entertainers to parade extra-extravagantly across the dingy stage.

  Just like in the army, George could provide invisible benefits to others, but could not extract any for himself, beyond the meagre pay the nightclub owners flipped his way in the form of grimy coins. It was hardly serious money, and so, just as he used to pilfer from his army buddies at basic training in Sorel, so now he took to wandering the deserted 2 a.m. streets of the metropolis with a jeweller’s hammer, screwdriver, and flashlight. He could tap a window just enough to shatter it, plunder cigarettes, chocolate bars, and other goods quick and easy to sell, or even jimmy a back door to a business to snatch up anything he could, hoping against hope against the possibility of guard dogs or burglar alarms or aroused owners toting guns or knives. These break-ins, little smash-and-grab jobs, netted negotiable rings, watches, smokes, and razors. It became routine: scour skuzzy, lipstick-ringed, cockroach-or cigar-dipped glasses, ashtrays fouled by chewing gum, half-eaten mints and candies, and then go out stealthily, early morning, to rattle doors and splinter windows, take whatever was portable and fly, crow-like, to the nearest shadows. He’d return to his snoring rooming house, as quietly as he could, sleep, then rise in the afternoon to make the rounds with his stolen property, showing up in tavern parking lots to furtively sell his ice-hot razors, watches, smokes, and rings.