“I will.”
He meant to turn quickly and go back down the steps, but instead he held out his hands to her for some unknown reason and took both of hers and pressure against pressure, and he felt a tremble run the length of her body, and both of them flaming with the great desire, and even then he wished for strength to turn quickly and walk down the steps and run as fast as he could away from this place, but he could not release her. There was no such strength on earth for him. And before he knew it she was in his arms and his mouth against her mouth, and body against body in a sweet and mortal combat as they tried desperately to get even closer.
“Fannie Mae!”
“Solly—Solly—darling Solly!” A shouted whisper.
And away over somewhere in a far-off corner of his guilty conscience was a warning signal and an image of Millie at the very last moment, even as his hands moved over the soft tender places of Fannie Mae’s throbbing body and he felt the love heat from all over her come through her clothing burning his hands, and a soft breeze blowing across the porch and the perspiration on his neck on his shoulders and the awful sweet wetness of her lips. Fannie Mae—Solly—her breath on his neck like a soft gentle whisper. It was much too late now for the guilty conscience. This was much too powerful for anything to stand in the way, as it overflowed now and spilled all over them. At that moment he knew no loneliness. Life was full and full and full. Life was love, and love was life.
The screen door opened noiselessly as she led the way back into the darkened house and they went quietly down the dark hall, and it was going to happen even as he had somehow known it would and had feebly fought against, and he was a fraud and it was going to happen and he couldn’t feel sorry it was going to happen. They went into the dimly lighted living room, and everything was so quiet, their breathing sounded like the wind blowing through the fallen leaves of autumn. Fannie Mae. Dear Fannie Mae. I cannot spare you goddamn you! He stared at her as she turned toward him, her sweet face overflowing with love, her long body, her plump bosom breathing almost sobbing, and she was the most desirable woman who ever lived in all the world in the million million years of time. He opened his mouth to say Fannie Mae like a fervent prayer, but his face filled up and voice choked off, as they went into each other’s arms again and lips against lips, body against body, he felt her knees buckle, and they almost went down to the floor.
He led her to the sofa and nothing else mattered in all the world except man and woman—this man, this woman. Solly and Fannie Mae. His clumsy hand unbuttoning her blouse and—
“No! Solly, no!” It was as if she said: Yes! Yes! Yes, my darling.
And now at last his glad hand held her swelling bosom, her bare breasts plump and soft and firm, and warmth and comfort, and sweetly brown-nippled and brown and dark brown and awfully tender to his touch. And bolder and bolder his hand became, a bold explorer, moving up her skirt now and over her feverish trembling body—
“Solly, please! Oh, God! Please, Solly! Stop! Stop! Stop! I mean it!” Dear Fannie Mae. Sweet Fannie Mae. Her thighs dark brown, long, roundish, warm. Varying shades of brown and black. Clashing and blending. And in between her thighs now the wet crotch of her panties told his happy hand how much she wanted him, even as she shouted angrily, “No, Solly, no! I don’t want to! Please—Solly! I don’t want to!” He heard her but it was all the same. He couldn’t help her now, he could not even help himself. She struggled and she wrestled, but he was not strong enough to let her go. He kissed her voice away and he wouldn’t be denied.
“Stop,” she whispered angrily, “or else I’ll call my father.” Her protests were like spurs that urged him on and on and on. And finally her struggling ceased.
“Turn off the light, darling! Turn off the light!”
His hand went out almost automatically, as if he were at home and knew where everything was, and he clicked off the light and the house was so quiet it sounded like a pistol shot. And when he turned to her again, he could still see her happy frightened face as the light slowly left the room. And he took her into his arms and nothing else existed.
And now he sat there next to her with the love taste in his mouth and the love smell in his nostrils and her lovely head on his shoulders and Millie Saunders on his mind very very much, and he wanted to feel sorry about what he had just done, but it really was too close at hand to feel any sorrow or remorse. It was all inside of him and all around him and leaning against him. It was in his mouth. It was in his nostrils. It was all through his body. He tried to make a picture of Millie in his mind, but he couldn’t quite make it. Each time it turned out Fannie Mae. Everywhere was Fannie Mae and everyone was Fannie Mae and Fannie Mae and Fannie Mae!
He was a boy again, a lonely boy, a long long time ago it seemed, and his mother a lonesome young woman in a big cold unfriendly city, in a two-room cold-water flat with patched linoleum on the floor. And he had been jealous of the man at first, when he started to come around to see his mother, but it wasn’t too long before the man won him over—a union-organizer man, tall and handsome and as glib as they made them, and he and his mother would talk about the union this and the union that, and Mama’s eyes would glow when he talked. The three of them would go to movies together and he would even help Solly with his homework sometimes. It was almost like having a father of his own. He even told some of his buddies on the block that Jack was his father returned from a trip to Africa. His father was a big-game hunter he told his buddies. But suddenly the great union-organizing man stopped coming around. And when Solly asked Mama what had become of Jack Benjamin, Mama said she didn’t know, maybe he had gone on an organizing trip. But the next time he asked her, she told him simply and bluntly, “He’s gone to Chicago—back to his family, his wife and three children, which I never knew he had till two weeks ago.” And later that night she told him, “It’s just menfolks in general, sugar pie. They’re no doggone good. No good in the world—just like dogs—every last one of them.” And the tears standing still in his mother’s eyes. And as he listened to her he felt his own face filling up, and he wondered about the dead man who had been his real father and the hundreds of times he had heard his mother say what a good man his father had been, and he tried to make a life-size picture of the man who had been his father.
He had been a boy then and now he was a full-grown man—an adulterer. He stared into the heavy darkness of the room. An adulterer. A thing he had never been before.
“What’s the matter, darling?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t want her to call him darling. He was an adulterer. He stared through the darkness at the fireplace where the fire had gone out long ago, but he imagined he saw shadows dancing on the hearth without any rhythm, like crazy little idiots dancing, and there was no comfort in them.
She clicked on the light and looked up into his troubled face and her own face full of dark eyes and sweet curving mouth partially open and white even teeth wet and glistening and love and love and love and maybe careless loveless love. The love already made gave her face a tranquil beauty he had never seen before. It was a qualitative transformation, softest sweetest face in all the world. And he wondered if it happened to every woman when she was really loved by the one she loved. He didn’t remember Millie’s face undergoing such a change.
“Solly—sweetheart! Tell me what’s the matter!” Her voice was troubled, her eyes were worried, but he resented the innocent beauty of contentment still in her face. And he didn’t want her to call him any sweet names, because he was a dirty dog.
He wanted to get up and get his garrison cap and be gone, but he wouldn’t move.
“Do you love me, Solly?”
He saw Millie clearly before him now and he couldn’t answer Fannie Mae.
“Do you, Solly, love me?”
He turned it over in his mind and deliberately made the question sound naïve and infantile to him. He thought of saying: Is that question necessary? Does a man have to love you to make love to you? Do you think you own me now�
�heart and soul and mind—just because you possessed my body for a few exciting moments? But instead he took her into his arms and kissed away her doubts and fears and she let herself believe that he had answered her. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! He kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her dark wet glistening eyes, and tasted her sweet salty tears, and he was a dirty low-down dog.
He looked at his watch, which he was unable to see in the dark. “I really have to go,” he said. He had to get out of there as fast as his feet would carry him.
“Of course you have to go,” she said. “If you don’t, my father will throw you out.” He hated the happiness he heard in her voice—the contentment and complacency.
And out on the porch with the full moon looking down on them he took her into his arms again for a quick desperate moment and kissed her briefly on her mouth and “Please be careful, Solly,” and he turned quickly and went down the steps and “Good night, Fannie Mae,” and he didn’t look back and “Good night, Solly, do be careful,” and he wouldn’t look back. He couldn’t.
CHAPTER 10
He could still taste sweet Fannie Mae in his mouth and feel her all inside of him and he could smell her special smell even as he thought about Millie away up north in New York City and Mama too. And here he was all by his lonesome walking through the darkness of a strange little cracker town called Ebbensville, Georgia. New York City and Ebbensville, Georgia. And he was a two-timer, a dirty low-down dog.
Street lights in the colored section were at every other corner. The alternate streets were a total blackout except for the moonlight soft and yellow. Solly’s feet were like desperate eyes as he felt his way along the bumpy dusty sidewalks and stumbled over rocks and ruts in the road, and the moon went behind a big dark cloud and he could not see his hand in front of his face (and Fannie Mae was so damn sweet), and he was all alone and Ebbensville was a mean cracker town.
He was a kid about fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and he had just begun to smell himself and wrestle and play with girls again, the opposite sex, and get a kick out of it. The first time he noticed the little fuzz above his lips and under his arms and in other places even more private . . . and reading every book he could get a hold of on the opposite sex . . . . And the moving pictures and never fully understanding what he read. And girls started to get prettier and prettier to him—all the girls—and their mouths were pretty and their eyes were pretty and their arms and their shapely legs were pretty. And his first affair in a vacant lot in the early darkness of a brisk fall evening and the awful heat crazily sweet, and the overgrown girl and arms and breasts that he couldn’t appreciate then and the thighs and legs and a ringing in his ears and Dora Mae moaning and groaning as if she were dying—he thought she might be—and then love’s awful strange sweet smell and a brand-new taste of life in his mouth that never never would be forgotten, and all of a sudden a great big change and he thought he knew he was a man. He could never be a boy again. He had no idea where Dora Mae was or even if she were living or dead—or even if her name were Dora Mae . . . .
At the intersection he stepped off the sidewalk and he felt his feet go out from under him and abruptly back from the past to the present he came and off into a great black nothing and his heart leaped through his mouth and down he went into a ditch. He swore out loud and picked himself up and limped across the dusty street. He could feel his feet going in and out of the powdery dust now like walking on the deep plush carpet in a New York hotel where he worked one summer. But he didn’t mind the bumpy road the dusty street the falling in the ditch the stinging bruises on his knees and arm, as long as he reached the bus station without being picked up by the MPs or Ebbensville’s “finest.” There was not an automobile in sight as he left the sidewalk and started to walk in the middle of the road in the middle of the total blackness. The whole world seemed to be fast asleep or playing possum. If he could just make it to the station. Just make it to the bus station. He would never get in this predicament again. He wouldn’t have the occasion, because he was never going back to Fannie Mae Branton’s, he promised himself.
Out of the colored section now and in the part of town where the not-much-better-off white people lived. The sound of his footsteps on the pavement was like an automobile backfiring, breaking the awful silence, and he wished for the dusty unpaved streets of the colored section. He tried to walk more softly but his footsteps seemed to get louder and louder, as if they were trying to wake up all the white people in Ebbensville, Georgia. If they caught him in this section of town they could do anything they wanted with him. The local police wouldn’t dare mess with him, he argued unconvincingly. He was a soldier in the U.S. Army. These crackers down here didn’t give a good goddamn about the U.S. Army. He was GI, he was Government Issue. They wouldn’t dare mess with him. But if the MPs picked him up, he could kiss OCS good-bye. The moon came out again and like a mighty floodlight it seemed to be aiming all of its beams on Solomon Saunders, Junior. There he is, white folks. There he is. He laughed bitterly aloud.
He froze in his tracks as he heard the growling sound of an automobile turning the corner behind him at the other end of the block and racing its motor. Sweat broke out all over his body. His feet took him without a conference from the middle of the road toward the sidewalk on the double. The worst they could do with him would be to turn him over to the post authorities at Camp Johnson Henry, and the worst he could be punished for was being AWOL for a couple of hours. Probably bust him down back to a private like the Bookworm and Scotty. And he could forget about his ambitions. He was an All-American goof. In Ebbensville, Georgia, they could do anything they wanted with him. They could kill him if it suited their pleasure. And yet he didn’t really want to believe that they would dare touch a soldier of the U.S. Army. They wouldn’t dare!
He jumped the hedges and landed into some white folks’ backyard and he could feel the glare of the automobile headlights hot on his back. He tried to make his body smaller. A split second passed and he found himself behind a big tree standing tall and dark and throwing moonlit shadows all over the yard. He stood there waiting—waiting—waiting for what? He was a soldier and maybe this was how he would die for his country—killed in action, in the foreign country of his birth. Standing behind a persimmon tree in some white person’s backyard like a common sneak thief. And they could give any alibi that came into their pure-white minds, or none at all. They could get him for burglary—they could get him for a peeping Tom. He stood there a million years sweating and waiting and hating violently hating the South and the Army for sending him way down South in the middle of nowhere to serve his country, and hating Fannie Mae for being whatever it was that she was and making him feel even more lonesome than ever before and being so warm and lovely and beautiful and militant, and hating himself especially for being so weak and susceptible to whatever it was that she was, and he should be back in the barracks, and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but his own. He heard the angry motor of the automobile distinctly now and his body drew up as stiff as a board, and he could hear his own breathing and feel his own breath. They had seen him and were playing a game. Goddamn them! He watched the arrogant police car drive up with flashlights sweeping both sides of the street, play briefly on the persimmon tree, hesitate, and his heart stopped beating and his hands tore angrily at the bark of the tree. The car continued up the street and turned at the next corner. And after they were gone he stood there shaking with helpless anger, the perspiration draining from him. He started to walk now, stumbling along, not giving a damn about the police car or the MPs or the Ebbensville police or anything else. He just wanted to get out of this foreign country where he was an alien, and never a citizen. A country where he was born and lived as a boy, but could never grow up to become a man. He heard another car coming up behind him. Well, let it come. He wasn’t going to run and hide behind a tree. But his body grew tense and hot and rigid as he heard the automobile slow down and felt the lights of the car playing on him now and the blood in his body hot and cold like
running water, but the lights were on him for only a moment as the car slowed down and turned into the driveway behind him. He breathed the night air strong and deeply. What the hell was he so nervous about? He walked two more blocks before he reached the street where the bus station was located. The bus would be leaving shortly, he thought, as the station came into sight across the broad plaza like an oasis on a vast desert. He saw the men lined up in two lines. He had to prevent himself from running. He was home safe. He was home safe!
He bought his ticket and stood at the foot of the colored line. He could breathe now. The Southern night was sweet to his nostrils and his throat. He wiped his face with an Army handkerchief, and he felt a great relief moving through his face and shoulders and down through his chest and into his stomach.
He was home safe! The perspiration drained from him. He would never goof like that again. Walking through that lonely town was the first time he really realized how desperately he wanted to get ahead in the Army, to be an officer and all the rest of it. And why not? The more Negro officers the more democratic the Army. Didn’t that make sense? Isn’t that what the war was all about?
The tall white bus driver said, “All aboard,” and naturally the white soldiers got aboard first, and as the colored started to get aboard more white soldiers straggled in, some of them staggering in their whiskey and whooping it up, and as long as they came, the Negro soldiers had to wait their turn. Solly Saunders stood at the foot of the line fuming with a helpless anger, as he saw the white soldiers run up at the last minute, laughing and cussing and shouting and good-natured and Southern accents and Midwestern drawls and Brooklyn brogues and: “Boy, these Georgia peaches are killer-dillers!”
“The eating kind!”
A couple of white soldiers came toward the bus, medium-sized fellows, one serious-looking and one with a devilish smile on his face. They halted near the door and stared at the soldiers in the colored line and glanced at the motorman.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 15