!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “Who the hell can that be?” Allis said and got up. I drifted along behind her. She snatched the door open and planted herself in the doorway.

  Mr. Storto stood there, dressed all in black and holding a bouquet of street-corner yellow roses and a brightly wrapped bottle that had to be wine.

  “Oh! Mr. Storto! Come in.” She backed out of the doorway and he entered, an inquisitive little smile on his face. He was wearing his battle ribbon. Allis kissed him and he thrust the bottle and the flowers into her arms. He smiled at me; his glance lingered on my face.

  “So, here I am at last.”

  I shook his hand and said, “Come sit down. So you finally came north.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced around. “Nice place.”

  “It’s all right. Can I get you some wine?” It was almost eleven.

  “A little glass.”

  “I’ll get it, honey,” Allis said from the kitchen.

  “You take a bus, subway or taxi, Mr. Storto?”

  “A cab. It’s been a long time. They’re expensive.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s the little boy?”

  “Okay.”

  “Glenn?”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t look too hot, Mr. Douglass.”

  “He’s tired, Mr. Storto,” Allis said. She came out with wine for all of us and the flowers in a vase.

  Mr. Storto slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “You know, I forget that people go to bed—I’m so used to staying up—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Here’s to your very first visit.”

  Mr. Storto saluted with his glass and sat back. “Look, my friends, I’m gonna go back to Italy.”

  “Italy,” Allis said. “But why?”

  “Well, let’s just say it’s time for me to go.”

  I said, “Do you have family there?” He’d never mentioned family. He looked a little tired himself and thin.

  “Naw. A couple of friends who went back. I decided that I didn’t wanna die here.”

  “What’s this dying business?”

  He shrugged his great, bulky shoulders. “We all gonna die an’ I’m closer to it than some people an’ I don’t wanna do it here, is all.”

  “Are you ill?” Allis asked. Her voice was gentle.

  “I got a tumor in the belly. I don’t wanna operation here. I’m gonna go home.”

  “This is your home,” Allis said. I could see that she was close to weeping again.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  Allis gasped. “But what about the house and—”

  “I sold the whole damn thing.”

  “After all these years in America, Mr. Storto—” I began.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, laughing abruptly, mirthlessly. “America. I came here an’ worked hard, married, lost my wife, lost my boy to still another war, an’ took his insurance money an’ my savings an’ bought a house, then a bigger house an’ then a building—our building. An’ that’s all; that’s my life in America. No book in that, hah, Mr. Douglass?” He studied his glass. “So, I came to say goodbye. I’ll write, I guess. Maybe not.”

  “We’ll write,” Allis said. She hesitated. “We didn’t know about your wife and son.”

  “Some things, what’s the good of talkin’ about them? It’d be nice hearin’ from you. Send me pictures of the boys, too, all right?” He got up slowly and stood solidly, studying the room.

  “You’re sure?” Allis asked.

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Would you like to take a look at Mack? He’s sleeping, but that’s all right,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, with a grin that was wan and gray.

  We clustered around Mack’s bed like three spirits, peering down at him in silence, and then we tiptoed out.

  “Big,” Mr. Storto said. “An’ he’s a good boy. It’s said that Garibaldi was married to a black woman from South America.” He mused. “I suppose there’s more of it than we could guess. Did you know the Moors were as far north in Italy as Rome? Sicily, forget it.” He looked around. “Well.”

  Allis went to him and he opened his arms. He patted her on the back. Even in my—what could I call it—state, whatever it might be called (and I was beginning to suspect that I was in some kind of state), I knew that Allis was thinking of fathers, fathers dying, fathers going, and as I looked at Mr. Storto’s full and wrinkled face and the water starting to rise, slowly, imperceptibly, a hydrostatic leaking in his eyes, he said, “So. Here is a daughter and here is a son. A Jew and a black with an Italian father who could be both an’ more.” He patted her again. “Then why is this place such shit, where such bad things can happen?”

  “I’ll walk with you to the corner,” I said.

  “No.” And he embraced me with a force that took my wind and then he stood back. “I know: muggers, junkies, thugs—but this is my city. Was my city, an’ I’m not afraid, Mr. Douglass. Only those rats I told you about. Nothing else.”

  We did walk him to the elevator. When the door closed to take him down, he was standing very erect.

  When we were in bed, I could tell that Allis was thinking of Mr. Storto. She sighed. She turned and twisted. Finally she said, “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know he was that sick. He didn’t look it.”

  “I didn’t either. No, he didn’t.”

  “And a wife and a son he never talked about. Only his brother.”

  “I think maybe he didn’t want pity, honey.”

  “I guess.”

  I wrapped my arms around her. “It means something that he came, darling. You know that.”

  “I know, but it’s flaking off here and there—”

  “What?”

  I felt her shrug. “Life. People we knew. Things. Please, Cate. I do want you to take the time off. We’re all of us so vulnerable.”

  “I promised to think about it, right? Don’t fret.”

  In mid-June I did take my first leave from the university. I hadn’t thought I’d have to. I believed that even with book orders to fill and lessons to plan and working on Pushkin and outlining Unmarked Graves and batting out a couple of article assignments, I’d have time to recover, as teachers sometimes do, and be chafing to hit the classroom once again in September. Time would have ceased to enclose me in a warp. I would hear the phone ringing, even a block away. I would no longer smell things burning that I could not find afire in the apartment.

  It did not turn out that way.

  Allis said that morning that the temperature was to go up into the 80s. But I felt cold. She was off to a conference downtown with some political P.R. people who wanted to raise money for their client. Allis had been doing a lot of that lately; it seemed to be the newest thing, and she preferred it to raising money for hospitals and private schools and churches, which always somehow seemed to miscalculate her 15 percent. On the other hand, she didn’t much like the politicians either.

  Mack would be going to a school picnic. He seemed to be as excited as I remembered being as a kid when it was time for the Sunday school picnic.

  I remember feeling sharply lonely. I had the feeling as I looked out the window toward the Park (we had moved upstairs to a larger place and another few yards of Park view) and thought how green it was. I went suddenly from being chilly to roasting. Flames burned up and down my body. I could almost see them. My body was being seared and fried. I couldn’t breathe. I stood there until I melted toward the floor. My flesh seemed to be dropping away from my skeleton, the way I once had seen flesh separate from the body of a Japanese soldier caught in the blast of a marine’s flame thrower.

  And yet things in the apartment maintained their usual inanimate serenity. I was at and was the center of destruction. I must have blacked out.

  I heard Latin music echoing up between the buildings. I lay where I’d fallen, and listened, thinking that Allis and the weatherman had been right: it was hot t
oday. I felt extremely tired but knew of no reason why I should be that tired. I rolled over and struggled to sit up. I don’t know how long I stayed in that position. Allis found me like that.

  When she asked in a tremulous voice what I was doing on the floor, I said, “Thinking.” She knelt and looked closely at me. I didn’t like what I saw on her face and I said quickly, “I think you’re right. I’m going to take a leave.”

  Her look softened; the fright faded a little. She sat down beside me. “Let’s travel,” she said.

  “No,” I said. We were holding hands tightly. “I don’t need any new experiences right now.”

  She considered that with bowed head, and looking at her neck, I wondered if she’d ever had an affair and with whom and if it had been pleasurable.

  She said, “Well, let’s go somewhere and stay for a while. Grenada?”

  “No.”

  “Spain? France? They wouldn’t be new experiences.”

  “No.”

  “Africa?”

  “No,” I said, and thinking I might be unreasonable, added, “I mean I just don’t know, honey.”

  “Should we get a doctor?”

  I had a frightful flash of Leonard. “Why am I thinking of Leonard?”

  “Leonard Blue-Sky?” She moved closer to me, squeezed my hand harder.

  “He knew something, Allis.”

  “What, darling?” She was going to say more. “Like something you’re just starting to let yourself know?”

  Aha! I thought. “Yes. That’s it. I like you a whole lot, Allis.”

  She smiled. “You used to say before Mack came, ‘Love ya today, baby,’ remember?”

  “Yeah. You wanna know why I stopped, huh?”

  “No. I know why you stopped.”

  “Because you knew it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, babes, I knew it. Look—should we?”

  “What?”

  “Get a doctor.”

  “Naw. We’ll work it out. But you know too, doncha?”

  “What, what do I know?”

  I felt a small licking of small flames and smelled something burning. Then the feel and smell were gone. “That nothing’s gonna change. That, after all, I’m not gonna matter and what I write isn’t gonna matter—”

  “No. You matter. It matters, and really, darling, I mean really, if that was not to be the case I don’t think we’d be here. It’s just that—just that these things don’t happen the way we’d like them to happen.”

  I didn’t know. I really didn’t know that she ever thought like that, and yet in a way I couldn’t describe I must have known that that was precisely the way she thought.

  “Let’s rent Amos’ place,” she said. Suddenly that seemed to be right. He was spending the summer in the Caribbean.

  “Okay. That seems okay,” I said. “I’d like that. Take a typewriter—”

  “Sit in front of the fireplace when it gets cool at night—”

  “—some fishing. Remember the bullheads we caught?”

  “They were good, but you have to cook them.”

  “I’ll cook them. You know I can burn when I want to. I’d really like that, honey. The sky’s so full of stars at night—”

  “What’s the matter?” Her voice banged sharply against my eardrums. Had I caused the panic I heard?

  “I am a little tired, kiddo.” I leaned out of her arms to the floor. “Just lemme lie down. I want to sleep.”

  She got up quickly and began tugging at me. “On the bed. C’mon.” I struggled on my knees to the bed and climbed up on it. I closed my eyes.

  Hank Lowe was there when I awoke. That surprised me. How had Allis managed to get him away from Westchester, from Columbia Presbyterian, from Park Avenue? For a dozen years Hank had been prying me apart once a year from asshole to eardrum, from eyeball to armpit. We had done much talking. He had read my books, he said, and liked them. I signed them for him. There was always a point during the exams when he stepped slightly back and looked thoughtfully at me—a brief, sharp look—and then wordlessly he’d resume. His unvarying advice to me? “Get some rest, Cate.”

  So there he was.

  “God,” I groaned. “How much is this gonna cost me?”

  “Hello, Mr. Wise-ass,” he said. “You’re taking a leave, Allis tells me.”

  “Yeah. She could’ve told you that on the phone.”

  “What’re you working on now, Cate?”

  “A couple of things.”

  “More like a dozen,” Allis said.

  “Do you have to?”

  “I should.”

  “Must you?”

  “I’ll take it easy. What happened to me?”

  He said, “You want bullshit?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Stress.”

  “Stress. Sounds, sounds, well—all-encompassing. But I’ll take it.”

  He was busy writing. “And you’re going away?”

  “Yeah, that’s the plan.”

  “When?”

  “In two weeks,” Allis said. “Mack’s finished with school then.”

  “Why do I feel so tired, Hank?”

  “Because you are, that’s why. You had any of those dreams about the war, foxholes, little old men, things like that?”

  “Not lately. But I had a great one about God and me playing pool with the universe. I think it was eight ball, not points.” I said nothing about the rest of the dream.

  He started laughing and then I started, though I’d really had the dream, and then Allis laughed. “And you won,” Hank said.

  “Aw no, man. You kidding? God won. Five straight. But I was really learning when the dream ended.”

  When his laughter died, he reached over and patted my cheek. “Sounds like another book, Cate. I’m gonna leave you some pills. You come to the office tomorrow morning for a workup. I think you’re all right. Maybe a few too many cosmic rays in the head. Gotta slow you down. Allis, you hear that?”

  “Yes, Hank. I know.”

  “What’re these fuckin’ pills?” I asked.

  “Slowing-down pills. The next time you play eight ball with God, ask Him. You come tomorrow. I don’t want to have to send for you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  6

  Allis wasn’t joking. In two weeks we were ensconced on Amos’ mountain, having arranged for a flow of visitors with children so that Mack wouldn’t grow lonely or bored with so much of the world staring him in the face. Allis had suspended all work until the fall, when we would have to be back anyway for Mack’s school.

  The second day, while we were out on the lake fishing, Allis told me that Glenn would be coming that weekend to spend some time with us and get into his book; that was to be a surprise. We would all be together. And that night, feeling again a sense of being alive and in touch with deeper things, we stared at the star-laden sky, picking out constellations, crying out at falling stars and marveling at the profusion of bodies glittering up there. As we watched, I told her about God and eight ball.

  It’s all a great pool table, Cate, God said. The cue stick—straight, true, balanced—is the will; it controls the cue ball, you see. The cue ball goes where I direct it—ignore the crude sexual implications, my boy—a little draw here, a little run there, some pull on either side of the center—just a little bit—and behold, it’s done! The ball runs way to the end of the table. The balls, solids and stripes (he laughed and it echoed like fading thunder), consider them heavenly bodies rushing about the table of the universe in response to this stroke or that—force, gravity, or lack of it, if you will. Some balls collide, like so—clack! Others narrowly miss; still others carom from cushion to cushion—call those edges of space, if you want—and there are always balls that just barely kiss—click!—in passing. Some, of course, must be put away (and here he snapped off a long diagonal shot down the table), like that planet that used to be between Mars and Jupiter. Left pieces of that floating around—hit it too hard. Messy, but interesting. (Briskly h
e moved around the table, chalking his cue stick and pocketing balls. He had solids.) Rack! he called.

  You see, Cate, the next rack all the balls are back. A new world! A new universe! Mosconi, Minnesota Fats, Cicero Murphy, Hoppe, they can tell you that playing pool is like playing god with the spheres in space. Otherwise it’s a silly game, don’t you think? Set them up and destroy; destroy and set them up; start all over again. You folk have some theories about that. He winked at me. He was already on his last ball. He had stripes this time. You’re probably wondering, my boy—Rack!—why the eight ball is the black ball and the last to go, the ball you must not get behind. And the cue ball, white like the sun, is the contact ball, moving here and there through the changing system of spheres, and if accidentally pocketed—Scratch!—must quickly be replaced and a ball forfeited. Well, the system must have its sun or it isn’t a system. The black ball is the stranger hidden in the heavens, a threat, a runaway planet, an asteroid hurtling out of orbit threatening everything. The Dark Prince hides behind galaxies, constellations and nebulae. One works and waits, pocketing all other balls before he is discerned. It must be that way. Pocket him by accident and you lose. Pocket him as planned—like so! Rack!—and you breathe a sigh of relief when he’s put away. Only then can we have a new game, world, universe. The black ball demands more, is more, than we can imagine. (He laughed again and it crackled down time like lightning left over from a war fought in space a million years ago.) He sighted down the table toward the triangular-shaped stack, the eight ball in the center, and slid the cue stick through his thumb and forefinger; the other three fingers were a solid bridge.

  Suddenly, he jerked a look over his shoulder, which was a shimmering mountain filled with sparkings. I followed his glance and saw (of course, I did not tell Allis this part of the dream) a young Japanese soldier aiming a rifle at me through the delicate webbing of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was firing. His shoulder snapped with the recoil, but I heard no shot, only saw words emerging from the muzzle of the rifle in a streamer like those towed by planes, and the words read, spilling out and curling effortlessly around great balls: WHO IS THAT NIGGER? WHO IS THAT NIGGEr? WHO IS THAT NIGGer? WHO IS THAT NIGger? WHO IS THAT NIgger? WHO IS THAT Nigger? WHO IS THAT nigger? WHO IS THAt nigger? WHO IS THat nigger? WHO IS That nigger? WHO IS that nigger? WHO is that nigger? WHO is that nigger? who is that nigger? who is that nigger?