by Ed Gorman
He kept staring at the quarter-moon and wondering about tomorrow. The nigger. He hated niggers and he wasn’t even sure why. Something happened to him when he fought colored men. Something even he was slightly afraid of. He never liked to feel out of control, but with niggers in the ring that was usually the way he felt, out of control.
He remembered the first time he’d killed one. How the crowd had become silent so abruptly, how the referee kept saying, “Goddammit, boy. Goddammit, you wake now, you hear?” But the nigger had been dead already. The way all niggers should be.
After the fight a reporter came back to his dressing room. The reporter kept asking him how he felt. He knew Stoddard would get angry if he said the wrong thing. There had been more than one hundred ring deaths in the past two years, and church groups were really protesting prizefights. He did not say anything stupid. His livelihood depended on his not saying anything stupid. He said instead the expected things. That he was sorry. That he hoped the boy’s family would understand. That he would say a prayer for the boy, in fact.
By the second time he had killed a colored boy, it was something most desirable for him to do. And not only for Stoddard’s sake, but for his own. He enjoyed killing.
She was crying now.
He said, “You’re a good mother. It’s not like you’re deserting them.”
“They’re my children.”
“We’ll see them often. I promise.”
“What would the priest think?”
He scowled. “The hell with the priest.” He remembered watching his sister die from smallpox. How the priest hovered. How the priest swooned. How the priest talked about an afterlife as if he really believed in it. As if we weren’t like cats and dogs and rats, animals that died and rotted. He had had no time for priests ever since.
She only cried all the more. “I suppose you would like me to give up my faith, too?”
He stayed on his side, looking at the quarter-moon.
It was always like this with them. They cried and then they got indignant and then they got angry. But they always came along.
Always.
Stephen Stoddard liked to walk the streets at dusk, just as the first fireflies appeared in parks and the electric lights appeared on the streets.
He passed from the downtown, with its barbershops and millinery stores and banks and jewelers and ice parlors, to an address he’d found in the newspaper.
Most cities these days had Evening Home Clubs, where young men could gather to discuss the issues of the day without consorting with the type of people you met in pumprooms and taverns.
He was most interested in discussing the gold standard, finding it the one topic that always provoked immediate and prolonged conversation.
Given the letter he carried in his suit coat, however, he wondered how able he would be to focus on a debate.
Now, as he walked, Stephen Stoddard shook his head. Incredibly the ex-Pinkerton he’d secredy hired a year ago had finally found Stephen’s mother. She lived in Portland, Oregon, half a continent away, and in the ten years since he’d last seen her, she’d gone on to start a whole new family. According to the photograph the ex-Pinkerton had enclosed with the letter, his mother was now plump, gray-haired, and surrounded by children bobbing around her like apples in a barrel.
His mother. He remembered soft, slender fingers and sweet songs hummed in the darkness. He remembered bread baking in the oven and the wet, clean scent of her long auburn hair just after she’d washed it. He remembered the sunlight on the new bicycle she’d bought him and moonlight on the silver ice of the skating rink.
He remembered her tears, too, how he’d been unable to stop them and felt the lesser for being so unable. The harshness of those tears. The increasing frequency of those tears.
Then she’d been gone, and gone forever.
Why, he’d never been able to understand exacdy, nor had his father been able or willing to explain.
Now he held in his possession a letter that promised to tell him. The letter had come the day before yesterday. He had still not opened it. He did not know if he was frightened or simply savoring this first word from his mother in all these years.
Whatever, each time his soft, slender fingers touched the envelope, they jumped away, as if stung or shocked.
There would be an appropriate time, an appropriate place, to open the letter.
Soon now, he told himself as he moved along the sidewalk in and out of the shadows cast by the streetlight.
Soon now.
Guild had to be careful with the stuff. Put too much on and he smelled too sweet. A little was all he needed.
As he stood fresh from his bath in new black trousers, Leo Guild looked at the way the flesh of his chest had started to sag some beneath the wiry salt-and-pepper hair.
As if the stuff would magically make him younger, he splashed on a generous amount of the bay rum he’d bought at the barber-shop a few days earlier. He next combed his hair and then pulled on a newly laundered white boiled shirt.
Putting on a false grin so he could get a look at his teeth, Guild at the same time began patting his stomach. Even if his chest was starting to go, his stomach was pretty damn flat for a man his age. Pretty damn flat.
He went over and sat on the bed and pulled on clean white socks and then his black Texas boots.
He wanted a steak and some bourbon. Most especially he wanted the company of Clarise Watson.
He started thinking of the litde girl. It was usually like this. Anytime he was about to have himself some fun, the little girl came to mind. A priest had explained to him that this was one way of continuing to punish himself. The litde girl was always there to remind him of that day. Of his mistake. Of his guilt.
He went over and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked around the hotel room. He thought of all the men who had stayed in this room before him. Of their pleasures and of their shame, of their loneliness for families far away. It was as if this room was haunted by all of them, a jumble of ghostly voices and griefs, but no voice, no grief was any clearer than that of the little girl’s. He had never given a name to her, even though during the course of the trial—Guild ultimately acquitted—he heard it daily. But a name made her real in a way he could not deal with. She would always be just “the little girl.” It was easier that way, somehow.
He opened the door on the third knock. He carried his .44 along with him. When he saw who it was, he leveled the gun to point directly at the man’s stomach.
Victor Sovich was once again dressed like an opera star, complete with cape. This time he’d even added a top hat and cane. He said, “What’s that smell?”
Guild flushed. He felt like an eight-year-old discovered doing something terrible. Sovich was referring to the bay rum. Guild said, “Some goddamn man before me must have spilled a bottle of bay rum.”
Sovich sniffed. Then he smirked. “That must be it, Guild. Some man before you must have spilled a bottle of bay rum.” He seemed to take as much pleasure from mocking Guild as he had yesterday from beating him.
“What do you want, anyway?” Guild said.
“I wonder if you’d like to talk some business.”
“What kind of business?”
Sovich said, “Why don’t we go downstairs and have a drink?”
“You can tell me right here.”
“Is it all right if I come in?”
“No.”
“You’re still mad about yesterday?”
Guild didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t anything personal, Guild. It’s just that you’re working for Stoddard. You know how it is.”
“Why are you working for Stoddard?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You keep saying he cheats you yet you keep right on coming back. There’s only one way to explain that.”
“And what would that be?” The smirk was back.
“He’s got something on you. Something he could use against you with the law.”
Guild just wanted Sovich out of his sight. “What kind of business do you want to talk about?”
“He’s going to short-count me again. He’ll take eighty percent and give me twenty percent. If I’m lucky.”
“That’s between you and Stoddard.”
“He’ll probably have you guard the gate money and the betting money.”
“So?”
“So you could take it all and give it to me.”
Guild hefted the .44 again. “Now why the hell would I do that?”
Just then an old man in a flannel robe came down from the bathroom. He smelled of hot water and sweat. It was much too hot for a flannel robe. He kept walking, but he gave them both a big blueeyed stare.
After the old man passed down the hall, Sovich said, “You’d do it because I’d pay you to do it. Fifteen percent of what you take from Stoddard you keep.”
“Maybe the fight won’t be as successful as you two think. Some of these fights people just don’t show up for.”
“Oh, they’ll show up for this one.” He smirked again. This expression was slightly different from the others. It was colder. “White folks always show up when a nigger’s going to get killed.”
“You ever think it could go the other way?”
“I never think that at all. Because it’s not going to.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You could make yourself a lot of money.”
“I could make you a lot of money, you mean. And that I’m against on principle.”
“You’re going to be old pretty soon, Guild. Principle won’t get you jack shit then. You’ll need money.”
Guild waved the .44 at Sovich. “Go on. Get out of here.”
“Fifteen percent, Guild. You could make yourself a lot of money.”
Guild slammed the door, but not before Sovich had a chance to smile again.
Guild went and sat on the edge of the bed until it was time to leave. He thought of the little girl. He wondered what she’d be doing now if she’d lived. Getting ready for the fall and high school, he thought. That was how he measured her years. Where she’d be in school.
Ninth grade now.
But of course that wasn’t going to happen.
He had seen to that.
Chapter Twelve
“Well,” said Clarise Watson, “I was bom in Illinois and I moved to Connecticut when I was twelve, where a white man was very much taken with me. He saw to it that I was educated and that I learned how to dress properly and that I had proper dental work. He was grooming me to work in his house, which meant, among other things, being his mistress. His wife was this very cold white-haired woman who was difficult for everybody to get along with, including her husband. I’m told that he’d had other mistresses before. She knew about them and would tease him with them. She would get one of the mistresses’ undergarments and leave it under his pillow. Or a gift he had given his mistress would be on his desk in the morning. She was the one with all the money, and all the power, and she never wanted to let him forget it. Finally she would make him so nervous and anxious that he couldn’t have sex with his mistress. He’d keep trying, but his wife leaving all these little hints would undo him. She took more pleasure in handling it this way than in just throwing the girls out. She liked humiliating him.
“As I said, I was told all this. When it was my turn—he liked his mistresses to have just turned sixteen—he took me by the hand and led me out to this guest house they kept down by a stream. He took me inside and took my clothes off one layer at a time. I’ve never seen a man more appreciative of a woman’s body. He was crying, and it was with pleasure.
“He carried me over to the bed and set me down on it and started to kiss me, and then it happened. I had no idea what was going on. He just started making these funny noises in his chest and throat, and then his eyes sort of started bugging out. I tried to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I ran up to the mansion to get somebody to help, and I was so terrified that I didn’t even care that I was naked. Then she saw me, his wife. She came running out of the house with a riding crop, and I kept screaming that her husband was dying. But instead of running down to the cabin to see if she could help him, she started beating me. She must have beaten me for fifteen minutes. Finally I just passed out. She had them put me in the bam, in the haymow. They were under strict orders not to help me in any way. I stayed there for four days. I had to drink from the same trough the horses did. I got the chills so badly one night that I had to steal a blanket from a horse who was cold, too. I never forgot the look in his eyes. He seemed to know what I was doing and forgave me for doing it.
“The husband didn’t live. The wife went to my family and told them that if they wanted to continue to work for her they’d have to send me to the city to live. She wanted to force me into prostitution.
“My father and mother had fourteen children. They had to look at the greater good—the well-being of thirteen children versus one child. I’m sure my mother never got over it, but they sent me anyway. I never did go into prostitution. I became a decorator for rich people. I even married a white man, but he could never forgive me for being a ‘high yellow’ as he always called me. Whenever he got drunk he beat me. He couldn’t forgive me for being part colored, and he couldn’t forgive himself for loving me.
“By then my brother had started boxing. I left my husband and traveled around with my brother until Rooney gave him that drink and killed him. And all this led me here, to try to kill Rooney.
“I’m sort of a disreputable woman, wouldn’t you say?”
She said she didn’t mind if he had an after-dinner cigar, so as they strolled along the river, he smoked.
On the dark water, the reflections of yellow and white city lights shimmered. Ducks floated and quacked. Rowboaters angled downstream toward the rush and roar and silver splash of the dam.
A soft breeze flowed over the grassy banks. Fireflies flickered and died. Lost in bushes, and happy to be lost, lovers giggled. An earnest young man in a straw boater sat on a park bench with a bored young woman and tried to impress her with his ukulele playing. An old immigrant sat in rags, despondent, staring at the shimmering water.
They walked upstream past the boat dock and the icehouses and pavilion where church ladies were carting off the last of the picnic baskets from a social.
“Have you even wanted a life like theirs?” Clarise asked Guild.
“I’m not sure.”
“You ever tried it?”
“Sort of, I suppose.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s not worth talking about.”
“Were you married?”
“For a time.”
“Were you happy?”
“That’s the part that’s not worth talking about.”
“I see.”
They walked some more. He finished his cigar, tossing the red eye of it into the black water.
Electric poles hummed and thrummed in the dark night along the graveled river road.
A white-nosed fawn stumbled out of undergrowth like a lost child, standing dazed in a circle of moonlight. Clarise went over to it and fell to her knees and hugged it as if she had borne it, and Guild was moved enough that he, too, went over and knelt and began petting the frightened animal.
At last came the fawn’s mother, a loose-fleshed animal that seemed, seeing them, both scared and angry. You could smell the night’s heat on the mother, and fecal matter.
The fawn disappeared back into the undergrowth with its mother.
Clarise and Guild went on their way.
They walked another mile. The river angled gently east. At its widest point the moon made the surface pure silver. Laughter came sharply from upriver, like gunshots, as two rowboats oared away from them.
They walked over and sat in the long grass on a ragged clay cliff above a ba
ckwash.
Clarise picked sunflowers, tucking one behind her ear. The other sunflowers she twirled, tossing them finally into the water below.
He was afraid to kiss her, but he kissed her anyway and she seemed quite pleased about it.
As they lay in the long grass, they could hear night birds and roaming dogs and distant cows. Nearer by, they could hear the soft lap of water on the shore and the wooden creak of rowboat oars and a young man singing a soft song, presumably to his girl.
He was scarcely aware of where his moments with Clarise were leading so suddenly.
“I can’t help the way I am,” Clarise said. “I don’t like most men, and it’s been a long time for me.”
“Will you roll me one of those?”
“Sure.”
“A lady oughtn’t smoke.”
“I suppose not.”
“But then a lady, a real lady, oughtn’t do what I just did.”
“Aren’t we a little old for oughtn’ts?”
She laughed. “Speak for yourself.”
He rolled the cigarettes and got them going red in the dark night. He gave her a cigarette and then lay down again with her. They’d put their clothes back on in case somebody came along.
“You seem like a troubled man, Guild.”
He did not want to talk about the little girl and spoil everything for them. He said, “And you seem like a troubled woman.”
They said nothing for a long time. They just listened to the soft lapping of water on the shore and the reedy sound of breeze through the long grasses.
“I enjoyed myself, Guild.”
“So did I.”
“I guess I don’t care if you think I’m a whore or not.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s what most white people think of us.”
“You want me to tell you what most white people think of me?”
She laughed again. “Look at that moon. You ever wonder what’s going on up there, in the parts that look like continents?”
“Sure. I wonder about that a lot.”