I tried to stop using those words, nuts and insane and crazy, because I thought I was too intelligent, but I may go back to it and give up psychology altogether. For a long time I used to think everybody in the world was insane and I was scared to death on account of it and had nightmares about all these maniacs being on the loose everyplace. But now that I know better I just get depressed. Because they still act like they’re crazy.
Anyway this whole Aunt Imelda attitude about my trip threw me for a loop. She started right off by saying she was tickled pink, and now I can’t even remember what all she said. (Another crazy thing, because usually I remember every word.) Also, she gave me this photograph she had taken in the dime store and made me promise I’d give it to Berry-berry. She must have moved her head when the shutter clicked, because it came out very blurry and makes her look like Mary Astor with little lights in her eyes and all.
Enough of that.
Now I’ve got to put something down that I hate. I don’t even want to think about it. But my whole theory is that if a thing is true or actually happened or got said by somebody, then I’ve got to put it down or else go crazy. I’m a firm believer in the principle if you admit a thing to yourself, no matter how terrible it is, you’re better off. The Bible backs me up a hundred per cent. It says the truth shall make ye free. Ralph says the Bible is fairy tales. Maybe so, but Shakespeare is also on my side in this thing, and so is Upton Sinclair.
Now the thing I have to put down is this. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the bus ride all alone through the mountains of Tennessee, I’m afraid of all the strange people I’ll meet all the way down there. I’m afraid of Key Bonita. I wish I had a real mean face with scars all over it and everybody was scared of me.
But the point is I know it’s a mistake to go down to Key Bonita. And I know something terrible is going to happen there, but I can’t stop myself from going. Naturally I could stop myself, because only a real nut gets driven to do things and go places he doesn’t want to go. But—
I just now cried. I picked up this notebook and held it like a little baby holds a Teddy bear and I cried. Now I feel better. But boy did I cry there for a while. Now I’m kind of laughing. I feel sorry for all the people who do not have a really close friend like this notebook. It’s only imitation leather, but if it got hurt or burned or anything, I’d bury it and say prayers just the same as if it was my own brother. Or any person I trusted enough to tell everything to.
I can’t wait to get on the bus.
Resolutions for trip. If you get really scared, write it all down, no matter how dumb it sounds. Then if somebody clubs you to death or you drown, or something even worse, it won’t make so much difference.
And if some really mean son of a bitch comes at you just because you’ve got a baby face, and starts screwing around and you haven’t got time to write it down—don’t let him know you’re scared. Just squint your eyes down to where they’re narrow as hell, talk real deep and snarl if you have to, and fight to kill. They call it a fishing town, okay, but these waterfront crooks are just the same as pirates and are sanguinary. This means they like bloodshed and prefer killing to any other amusement. I don’t happen to believe this just because it’s common knowledge either. It happens to be the God’s truth, I just know it.
Maybe going on this trip is not a mistake after all. Ever since I made up my mind to go I have not once masturbated or even considered it. Which is fabulous because there for a while it got so bad I was afraid of getting pimples. At my age, if you get pimples, everybody knows you’ve got this dirty habit, and it’s a big mess. So no matter how black it all looks at times, I’m really lucky as hell about certain things.
In twenty hours, I’ll be getting on the bus. I’m still afraid but it doesn’t make any difference because I’d rather die than not go where Berry-berry is. Even some awful death like toothpicks pushed under my fingernails and branding irons in my eyeballs. Do I really mean this?
Yes, I do.
See, in your mind, the west coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. Picture a chain of seven islands, linked together by bridges. This chain curves gently to form an S. The top of the S is attached, by another bridge, to the mainland, a few miles south of Naples. The bottom point of the S is an island called Key Bonita.
A bus called Tamiami will bring you as far down the coast as Naples, but from there a traveler to Key Bonita has to choose between a number of inconvenient alternatives. An Everglades bus would leave him four miles from that first bridge, and continue its journey east; there is a local bus line that would take him directly to Key Bonita, but it sends a bus down that way only once in two days. The third choice is hitchhiking; but motorists are few in the Everglades, and these few are nervous and drive fast: this is desolate swampland, and a lone figure on the highway arouses suspicion. Therefore, the hitchhiker’s chances are slim, and he may end up with a long mean walk before him.
But this was the method Clinton Williams chose. At first his luck ran high. A cheerful man in a long black car brought him to the fork, the very point at which the swamp bus turns off into the Everglades on its way to the east coast. But from there, the going was hard.
After an hour, in which darkness had begun to fall and only six cars had turned off in the direction of the bridge, he set out to walk the four miles. The road was straight and dreary, lined with mangroves and scrubby seagrape trees. Serpents lived there, camouflaged in the mangroves’ twisted roots, and on the surface of the dead-still waters, mosquitoes in their millions bred millions more. These bloodthirsty nuisances raised welts on Clinton’s skin. After a few minutes he gave up slapping at them or even scratching the places they had bitten. Scuffling lizards made nightmare noises, and frogs croaked in their hiding places. For a while, the boy sang any song that came into his head, just to drown out their sounds. But after a time, when he gave up resisting any of these miseries, they became strangely pleasurable. The full moon, like some demon skilled in chiaroscuro, made awful shadow creatures to hide imperfectly in the foliage. Clinton wondered why he was not afraid of them: it was as if he had died and gone to hell and found it curiously to his taste. He tingled with the excitement of this terrible place. If one of the moon’s monsters had come forward, he might have reached out to it eagerly, hugged it to his itching, perspiration-drenched body, and begged it to make love to him. For he had become, to himself, one of its miserable creatures, a shape of evil, ready to surrender.
Who knows how long he trudged forward on this road, absorbed by these feelings a hot country can engender in a stranger? Perhaps an hour or two, or more. And then he reached the bridge, the bridge that was the top of the chain of islands that ended in Key Bonita.
Perhaps two hundred yards long, built on pilings without a superstructure, the bridge was an overseas continuation of the swamp road. Clinton walked out to the center of this bridge. He wanted to have the feeling of being over the water, away from the swamps. Then he sat on the concrete railing and lighted a cigarette. Before he had smoked even half of it, a motorcycle roared past him, the first vehicle of any kind that he had seen since nightfall. The motorcycle did not slow down for him; it continued in the direction of Key Bonita. But Clinton knew it would come back and give him a lift. He did not know how he knew, but he was certain.
He put out his cigarette, picked up his duffel bag, and waited. Then he heard the slow return of the motorcycle. As it passed him this second time, at low speed, its driver studied Clinton’s appearance, stopped ten yards from him, and turned around.
The rider was in his twenties, dark, solidly built. Like Clinton, he wore Levis, a T-shirt. He removed his goggles. His voice was deep, husky. “You want a ride?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come here.”
Clinton walked quickly to his side.
“Where you goin’?” the man said.
“Key Bonita.”
“You live there?”
“No, but my brother does. He’s waiting there for me. His name is B
erry-berry Williams.”
“Berry-berry?” The stranger’s interest quickened.
“You know him?”
No answer. The man said, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You got a knife?”
“Yeah. You want to use it?”
“Let’s see it.”
Clinton reached into his pocket and withdrew his key ring from which depended the small knife given him by the Red Cross Shoes salesman. “It’s just a little one,” he said, “for cutting string. You know, and fingernails.”
The man took the knife, glanced at it quickly, then handed it back with a derisive little laugh. He strapped the duffel bag to a bar under the seat. Clinton put his notebook in his trousers, under the belt.
“Hop on,” the man said. Clinton got on. “You ever ride a buddy seat before? Keep your feet on those bars. And hang onto me, around my belly. We’re gonna travel.”
At the first island, there was a sharp increase in speed. The hot and heavy night was transformed by an endless rush of wind in Clinton’s face, against his legs. Even the landscape changed: the mangroves on the left became an insignificant strip of black, and on the right lay the Gulf of Mexico. With his chest against the back of the cyclist, and his arms encircling him, the motorcycle itself seemed to come to life and breathe as it roared forward from island to island and bridge to bridge. These last miles of his journey to meet Berry-berry had taken on the proportions of a myth. Out of the swamp-hell had come this wild animal of the night, and on its back he now raced across a world so transformed that the change seemed to have been worked by magic. Each mile had in it not only its own swift beauty, this heaven of speed, but the knowledge, as well, that it drew him closer and closer to the true beginning of his life. If anything marred his pleasure, it was his desire to get all these experiences into his notebook; but even that diminished as he began to hope that, having passed, on this very night, some invisible threshold into the life of his dreams, the need for a record might have fallen away and his friendship with the notebook terminated. It was still there, though. He could feel it under his belt, the imitation-leather binding pressed against his belly, the only part of him that continued to perspire.
Once you have crossed the bridge onto Key Bonita, you see a lot of coconut trees. They line the highway along the Gulf. If you look through these palms and past the bight, you see a few lights from the town itself: streetlamps, the windows of fishing lodges, the neon of taverns, hamburger places and tourist courts. The foliage is dense and it makes these lights seem to twinkle like lightning bugs. Along the boardwalk at the edge of the bight, moored to the many piers that extend from it, there are hundreds of boats: shrimp boats and barges, boats for pleasure and for every kind of fishing. You will even see a houseboat with laundry hanging on her decks and potted palms on her windowsills.
Go along for another mile, pass a traffic light, turn to the right, and you are on the main street of the town, Gasparilla Street, named for a buccaneer who made his headquarters here in the darker days of blood and treasure. The houses are old, made of wood, most of them white but a number of them gray from neglect and in bad repair. Many of the yards are unkempt and have turned to jungle: thick clumps of banana trees send up leaves taller than men to reach into the fern-like branches of poincianas; the giant philodendron vines are like serpents in fancy dress, they climb every wall and fence and suck the knotted trunks of banyan trees; there are breaks in the sidewalks where rubber-tree roots have gone berserk; and enormous cactus plants lean on houses, like monsters with tiny brains they threaten the lacework of tired Victorian porches.
You see people on the streets all night long. Sailors alone and in twos and threes, Latin dandies in pleated shirts, black-haired women at their elbows, drunken shrimpers clinging to parking meters for support. And all the solitary persons. Men and women young and old lean on storefronts and streetlamps, wander in and out of taverns, all of them seeming to take part in the same slow and indifferent search. And for every person you see, you will feel as sharply the presence of several invisible souls. For the town is plainly haunted. Lazy ghosts of old inhabitants rock forever on all the empty porches, and others watch over the street from shutters at second-story windows. If you do not believe in ghosts, the town will make you nervous: give up your disbelief or you will wonder forever at the sources of certain inexplicable sounds.
A number of young men in their late teens and early twenties leaned against the green plaster front of a hamburger place called Pepito’s. Others congregated in its doorway.
Most of these young men watched the arrival of the motorcycle, watched with a kind of boldness of eye that would disturb any stranger.
Clinton climbed off and started to untie his duffel bag, but the owner of the bike stopped him gruffly. “Here! I’ll do that!”
Then he tossed the bag into Clinton’s arms. “Okay. Now you want something else?”
“No. I just wanted to thank you because—well, thanks. That’s all.”
The man said nothing.
“You know where the Tin Pot Arms Hotel is?” Clinton asked.
“The end of the street. On the water.”
The other young men had moved in closer. They seemed to want to know everything that took place in front of Pepito’s. Clinton glanced quickly at them, and then his eyes returned to the dark man who had given him the ride.
“You want somethin’ else now?” the man challenged him.
“No, but thanks for the ride.”
“Okay. Move.”
Clinton wanted to walk away, but he had been made to feel there was some challenge he had not accepted. “Look,” he said, “you give me a ride for about twenty miles or maybe even thirty, and now you act like you’re sore about something. How come?”
The man did not answer. And suddenly Clinton knew that he could not. For he belonged to this group of loiterers, and one of their unspoken rules called for strict hostility to strangers. Something in the man’s eyes had told him this; then he shrugged a shoulder and walked into Pepito’s. Clinton watched him enter the place, and a few of the men followed him inside. After one slow glance at the remaining young men, a glance that he hoped would convey, “Don’t mess with me, I’m mean as hell,” Clinton turned and walked toward the end of the street, feeling that he had dealt with his first band of pirates.
He did not hurry. He wanted to savor every step of the hundred yards that lay between himself and the Tin Pot Arms Hotel. He had thought a good deal on the bus from Cleveland—and written much in his notebook—about what this last few minutes of the trip would be. Now he tried to force the reality of it into his head, but for some reason, perhaps fatigue, his eyes saw the place without making any real contact with it. It was an enormous three-story frame building that had not been painted for a long time. There was a widow’s walk at the peak of the roof; and through the jungle garden that separated it from the street, Clinton caught brief glimpses of the once-elegant old galleries that surrounded its two lower floors. Hanging over the front steps of the place was a large tin cutout of its symbol. But there was no lettering on it, just this rusty old silhouette of a tin pot.
Now Clinton stopped walking altogether. He had studied the advisability of certain attitudes he might adopt when he actually walked into Berry-berry’s room. He had thought up ways of impressing him with the necessity for including him in the shrimp-boat partnership, certain unanswerable arguments in favor of their traveling together. In fact, he had experienced this meeting so often in his imagination that he was now at a loss as to how to manage it.
He entered the hotel and approached the desk. The clerk bore a startling resemblance to Ralph Williams, though older and more decrepit.
Clinton said, “I’m looking for Berry-berry Williams.”
“Not here,” the old man said, his eyes on a magazine.
“When does he generally get back?” The old man did not seem to hear this question. Clinton said, “Can I use his room to w
ait for him in? I’m his brother.”
The clerk looked at him quickly. “He ain’t got a room here n’more. He give it up.”
“Well, where’d he move to?”
The clerk shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked into a dime-store ledger that served as a register. “Left on Friday,” he said. “Just paid up and left.”
“You mean—town? He left town?”
“That’d be my guess. But I don’t know one way or the other.”
“Then why would that be your guess, that he left town?”
The clerk leaned over and took off a shoe. He put his hand inside of it, felt it with his fingers. ” ‘Cause if I’d been him, I woulda.”
“Why?”
The clerk, still exploring the inside of his shoe, glanced at Clinton through narrowed eyes. “You say you’re his brother?”
“I am his brother.” Clinton was ready to defend this point, if necessary.
“What you do,” asked the clerk, “come down here from up North?”
Clinton nodded. “Cleveland.”
“Just to see him?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothin’. ‘Cept he idden here. That’s all.”
“Look, it’s very important, I got to find him.”
The clerk placed the shoe on the floor in front of him. “I’d try the jail,” he said.
“The jail?” Clinton stood there for a moment, watching as the clerk tied his shoe. “So you think maybe he’s in jail, huh?”
“Tell you what you do, go to the fellow at the desk. Name’s Ramírez. He’s the lieutenant. You go to Ramírez and ask him where Berry-berry is.” The clerk enjoyed giving these directions. “Don’t even have to give his last name, just say Berry-berry. They all know him over there.”
The Key Bonita jail is on a short lane called Hawthorne Alley, two and a half blocks from the Tin Pot Arms Hotel. It is a one-story affair, made of stone, old, run-down, illuminated by fluorescent lights. Three young policemen, in short-sleeved summer uniforms open at the throat, lounged on benches inside the front door. A somewhat older man, swarthy and black-haired, with a thin, suave mustache, was seated at a desk in the far corner of the room.
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