Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  And then it became very silent again. The raccoon lay on the road twenty yards in front of the Reeveses’ car. It didn’t struggle. It was merely there.

  “Gross,” Marjorie said.

  Steven said nothing, though he felt less at a loss for words now. His eyes, indeed, felt relieved to fix on the still corpse of the raccoon.

  “Do we do something?” Marjorie said. She had leaned forward a few inches as if to study the raccoon through the windshield. Light was dying away behind the slender young beech trees to the west of them.

  “No,” Steven said. These were his first words—except for the words he took no responsibility for—since Marjorie had said what she’d importantly said and their car was still moving toward dinner.

  It was then that he hit her. He hit her before he knew he’d hit her, but not before he knew he wanted to. He hit her with the back of his open hand without even looking at her, hit her straight in the front of her face, straight in the nose. And hard. In a way, it was more a gesture than a blow, though it was, he understood, a blow. He felt the soft tip of her nose, and then the knuckly cartilage against the hard bones of the backs of his fingers. He had never hit a woman before, and he had never even thought of hitting Marjorie, always imagining he couldn’t hit her when he’d read newspaper accounts of such things happening in the sad lives of others. He’d hit other people, been hit by other people, plenty of times—tough Maine boys on the ice rinks. Girls were out, though. His father always made that clear. His mother, too.

  “Oh, my goodness” was all that Marjorie said when she received the blow. She put her hand over her nose immediately, but then sat silently in the car while neither of them said anything. His heart was not beating hard. The back of his hand hurt a little. This was all new ground. Steven had a small rosy birthmark just where his left sideburn ended and his shaved face began. It resembled the shape of the state of West Virginia. He thought he could feel this birthmark now. His skin tingled there.

  And the truth was he felt even more relieved, and didn’t feel at all sorry for Marjorie, sitting there stoically, making a little tent of her hand to cover her nose and staring ahead as if nothing had happened. He thought she would cry, certainly. She was a girl who cried—when she was unhappy, when he said something insensitive, when she was approaching her period. Crying was natural. Clearly, though, it was a new experience for her to be hit. And so it called upon something new, and if not new then some strength, resilience, self-mastery normally reserved for other experiences.

  “I can’t go to the Nicholsons’ now,” Marjorie said almost patiently. She removed her hand and viewed her palm as if her palm had her nose in it. Of course it was blood she was thinking about. He heard her breathe in through what sounded like a congested nose, then the breath was completed out through her mouth. She was not crying yet. And for that moment he felt not even sure he had smacked her—if it hadn’t just been a thought he’d entertained, a gesture somehow uncommissioned.

  What he wanted to do, however, was skip to the most important things now, not get mired down in wrong, extraneous details. Because he didn’t give a shit about George Nicholson or the particulars of what they’d done in some shitty motel. Marjorie would never leave him for George Nicholson or anyone like George Nicholson, and George Nicholson and men like him—high rollers with Hinckleys—didn’t throw it all away for unimportant little women like Marjorie. He thought of her nose, red, swollen, smeared with sticky blood dripping onto her green dress. He didn’t suppose it could be broken. Noses held up. And, of course, there was a phone in the car. He could simply make a call to the party. He pictured the Nicholsons’ great rambling white-shingled house brightly lit beyond the curving drive, the original elms exorbitantly preserved, the footlights, the low-lit clay court where they’d all played, the heated pool, the Henry Moore out on the darkened lawn where you just stumbled onto it. He imagined saying to someone—not George Nicholson—that Marjorie was ill, had thrown up on the side of the road.

  The right details, though. The right details to ascertain from her were: Are you sorry? (he’d forgotten Marjorie had already said she was sorry) and What does this mean for the future? These were the details that mattered.

  Surprisingly, the raccoon that had been cartwheeled by the pickup and then lain motionless, a blob in the near-darkness, had come back to life and was now trying to drag itself and its useless hinder parts off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the grassy verge and into the underbrush that bordered the reservoir.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Marjorie said, and put her hand over her damaged nose again. She could see the raccoon’s struggle and turned her head away.

  “Aren’t you even sorry?” Steven said.

  “Yes,” Marjorie said, her nose still covered as if she wasn’t thinking about the fact that she was covering it. Probably, he thought, the pain had gone away some. It hadn’t been so bad. “I mean no,” she said.

  He wanted to hit her again then—this time in the ear—but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why not. No one would ever know. “Well, which is it?” he said, and felt for the first time completely furious. The thing that made him furious—all his life, the very maddest—was to be put into a situation in which everything he did was wrong, when right was no longer an option. Now felt like one of those situations. “Which is it?” he said again angrily. “Really.” He should just take her to the Nicholsons’, he thought, swollen nose, bloody lips, all stoppered up, and let her deal with it. Or let her sit out in the car, or else start walking the 11.6 miles home. Maybe George could come out and drive her in his Rover. These were only thoughts, of course. “Which is it?” he said for the third time. He was stuck on these words, on this bit of barren curiosity.

  “I was sorry when I told you,” Marjorie said, very composed. She lowered her hand from her nose to her lap. One of the little green bows that had been in her hair was now resting on her bare shoulder. “Though not very sorry,” she said. “Only sorry because I had to tell you. And now that I’ve told you and you’ve hit me in my face and probably broken my nose, I’m not sorry about anything—except that. Though I’m sorry about being married to you, which I’ll remedy as soon as I can.” She was still not crying. “So now, will you as a gesture of whatever good there is in you, get out and go over and do something to help that poor injured creature that those motherfucking rednecks maimed with their motherfucking pickup truck and then because they’re pieces of shit and low forms of degraded humanity, laughed about? Can you do that, Steven? Is that in your range?” She sniffed back hard through her nose, then expelled a short, deep and defeated moan. Her voice seemed more nasal, more midwestern even, now that her nose was congested.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” Steven Reeves said, and opened the car door onto the silent road.

  “I know,” Marjorie said in an emotionless voice. “And you’ll be sorrier.”

  When he had walked down the empty macadam road in his tan suit to where the raccoon had been struck then bounced over onto the road’s edge, there was nothing now there. Only a small circle of dark blood he could just make out on the nubbly road surface and that might’ve been an oil smudge. No raccoon. The raccoon with its last reserves of savage, unthinking will had found the strength to pull itself off into the bushes to die. Steven peered down into the dark, stalky confinement of scrubs and bramble that separated the road from the reservoir. It was very still there. He thought he heard a rustling in the low brush where a creature might be, getting itself settled into the soft grass and damp earth to go to sleep forever. Someplace out on the lake he heard a young girl’s voice, very distinctly laughing. Then a car door closed farther away. Then another sort of door, a screen door, slapped shut. And then a man’s voice saving “Oh no, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, no.” A small white light came on farther back in the trees beyond the reservoir, where he hadn’t imagined there was a house. He wondered about how long it would be before his angry feelings stopped mattering to him. He considered briefly why Marjorie would admit thi
s to him now. It seemed so odd.

  Then he heard his own car start. The muffled-metal diesel racket of the Mercedes. The headlights came smartly on and disclosed him. Music was instantly loud inside. He turned just in time to see Marjorie’s pretty face illuminated, as his own had been, by the salmon dashboard light. He saw the tips of her fingers atop the arc of the steering wheel, heard the surge of the engine. In the woods he noticed a strange glow coming through the trees, something yellow, something out of the low wet earth, a mist, a vapor, something that might be magical. The air smelled sweet now. The peepers stopped peeping. And then that was all.

  Edward P. Jones

  THE STORE

  I’d been out of work three four months when I saw her ad in the Daily News; a few lines of nothing special, almost as if she really didn’t want a response. On a different day in my life I suppose I would have passed right over it. I had managed to squirrel away a little bit of money from the first slave I had, and after that change ran out, I just bummed from friends for smokes, beer, the valuables. I lived with my mother, so rent and food weren’t a problem, though my brother, when he came around with that family of his, liked to get in my shit and tell me I should be looking for another job. Usually, my mother was okay, but I could tell when my brother and his flat-butt wife had been around when I wasn’t there, because for days after that my mother would talk that same shit about me getting a job, like I’d never slaved a day before in my life.

  That first slave I had had just disappeared out from under me, despite my father always saying that the white people who gave me that job were the best white people he’d known in his life. My father never had a good word to say about anybody white, and I believed him when he said I could go far in that place. I started working there—the Atlas Printing Co. (“75 years in the same location”)—right after I graduated from Dunbar, working in the mailroom and sometimes helping out the printers when the mail work was slow. My father had been a janitor there until he got his third heart attack, the one that would put him in the ground when I was in my sophomore year at Dunbar.

  At twenty I was still in the mailroom: assistant chief mail clerk or something like that, still watching the white boys come in, work beside me, then move on. My mother always said that every bullfrog praises his own poem, but I know for a natural fact that I was an excellent worker. Never late, never talked back, always volunteering; the product of good colored parents. Still . . . In the end, one bitching cold day in January, the owner and his silly-ass wife, who seemed to be the brains of the outfit, came to me and said they could no longer afford to keep me on. Times were bad, said the old man, who was so bald you could read his thoughts. They made it sound like I was the highest-paid worker in the joint, when actually I was making so little the white guys used to joke about it.

  I said nothing, just got my coat and took my last check and went home. Somewhere along K Street, I remembered I’d left some of my personal stuff back there—some rubbers I’d bought just that morning at Peoples, a picture of the girl I was going with at the time, a picture of my father, my brother, and me at four years old on one of our first fishing trips. I had the urge to go back—the girl was already beginning not to mean anything to me anymore, so I didn’t care about her picture, but the fishing trip picture was special. But I didn’t turn back because, first of all, my balls were beginning to freeze.

  My father always said that when the world pisses on you, it then spits on you to finish the job. At New York Avenue and 5th I crossed on the red light. A white cop twirling his billy club saw me and came to spit on me to finish up what Atlas had done: He asked me if I didn’t know it was against D.C. and federal law to cross on the red light. I was only a few blocks from home and maybe heat and thawing out my nuts were the only things on my mind, because I tried to be funny and told him the joke my father had always told—that I thought the green light was for white folks and the red light was for colored people. His face reddened big-time.

  When my brother and I were in our early teens, my mother said this to us with the most seriousness she had ever said anything: “Never even if you become kings of the whole world, I don’t want yall messin with a white cop.” The worst that my mother feared didn’t happen to her baby boy that day. The cop only made me cross back on the green light and go all the way back to 7th Street, then come back to 5th Street and cross again on the green light. Then go back to 7th to do it all over again. Then I had to do it twice more. I was frozen through and through when I got back to 5th the second time and as I waited for the light to change after the fourth time and he stood just behind me I became very afraid, afraid that doing all that would not be enough for him, that he would want me to do more and then even more after that and that in the end I would be shot or simply freeze to death across the street from the No. 2 police precinct. Had he told me to deny my mother and father, I think I would have done that too.

  I got across the street and went on my way, waiting for him to call me back. I prayed, “Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely and I’ll never come to their world again. . . . Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely. . . .” For days after that I just hung out at home. My mother believed that a day had the best foundation if you had breakfast, so after she fixed our breakfast, and went off to work, I went back to bed and slept to about noon.

  When I got some heart back, I started venturing out again, but I kept to my own neighborhood, my own world. Either my ace-boon, Lonney McCrae, would come get me or I would go looking for him and we’d spend the rest of the afternoon together until our friends got off work. Then all of us would go off and fuck with the world most of the night.

  Lonney was going to Howard, taking a course here and there, doing just enough to satisfy his father. I’d seen his old man maybe once or twice in all the time I knew Lonney, and I’d been knowing him since kindergarten. His father had been one of the few big-shot Negro army officers in the Korea war, and Lonney was always saying that after the war his father would be home for good. He was still saying it that January when Kennedy was inaugurated.

  Lonney liked to fuck bareback and that was how he got Brenda Roper pregnant. I think he liked her, maybe not as much as she liked him, but just enough so it wasn’t a total sacrifice to marry her.

  I was to be his best man. One night, all of us—me and Lonney and his mother and Brenda and her parents—were sitting around his living room, talking about the wedding and everything. Someone knocked on the door and Lonney opened it. It was his old man, standing there tall and straight as a lamppost in his uniform. You know something’s wrong when a man doesn’t even have a key to his own house.

  The soldier didn’t say Hello or Good to see you, son. He just stood in the doorway and said—and I know he could see everybody else in the room— “You don’t have anything better to do with your time than marrying this girl?” Lonney’s mother stood up, in that eager, happy way women do when they want to greet their husbands home from a foreign land. Brenda’s father stood up too, but he had this goofy look on his face like he wanted to greet his soon-to-be in-law. “I asked you something,” Lonney’s father said. Lonney said nothing, and his father walked by him, nodded at Mrs. McCrae, and went on upstairs with his suitcase. The next morning he was gone again.

  Lonney married Brenda that March, a few weeks before I saw the ad in the Daily News. I think that he wanted to make things work with Brenda, if only to push the whole thing in his father’s face, but the foundation, as my mother would have said, was built on shifting sand. In about a year or so he had separated from her, though he continued to be a good father to the child, a chubby little girl they named after his mother. And some two years after he married, he had joined the army and before long he himself was in a foreign land, though it was a different one from where his father was.

  The day before I saw the ad I spent the evening at Lonney and Brenda’s place. They fought, maybe not for the first time as newly-weds, but for the first rime in front of me. I
felt as if I were watching my own folks arguing, as if the world I knew and depended on was now coming apart. I slept till one the next day, then went down to Mojo’s near North Capitol and Florida Avenue and hung out there for most of the day. Late in the day, someone left a Daily News at a table and over my second beer, with nothing better to do, I read the want ads. Her ad said:

  STORE HELPER. Good pay. Good hours.

  Good Opportunity for Advancement.

  Then she had the store’s location—5th and O streets Northwest. The next morning I forced myself to stay awake after my mother had left, then went off about eight o’clock to see what the place was about. I didn’t want any part of a white boss and I stood outside the store, trying to see just who ran the place. Through the big windows I could see a colored woman of fifty or so in an apron, and she seemed to be working alone. Kids who attended Bundy Elementary School down the street went in and out of the store buying little treats. I walked around the block until about nine, then went in. A little bell over the door tinkled and the first thing I smelled was coal oil from the small pump just inside the door. The woman was now sitting on a tall stool behind the counter, reading the Post, which she had spread out over the glass counter.

  She must have known I was there, but even after I was halfway to her, she just wet a finger and turned the page. I was inches from the counter, when she looked up. “Somethin you want?” she said. Oh shit, I thought, she’s one of those bitches. I could feel my balls trying to retreat back up into my body.

  “I come about the job in the paper,” I said.

  “Well, you pass the first test: At least you know how to read. What else you know how to do? You ever work in a store before? A grocery store like this?”